These works begin with the body — not as subject, but as collaborator.
The oldest known fired ceramic object in the world — the Venus of Dolní Věstonice, made 29,000 years ago — carries a child's fingerprint pressed into the clay before firing. It was found broken, in ash.
A woman made a form of her own body, in a communal space, with a child present, and it went into the fire with the mark of that child already held inside it.
When I first encountered this figurine, after my own body had changed through childbirth, I recognised it immediately. Not as art history. As conversation.
I made my own Venus figurines in response.
The Lineage
Iron ochre, fixed with casein. Releases onto the hands of whoever holds it.
The surface starts a conversation the object itself initiates.
Weald clay. Fired grog from contemporaries. Tokens of place, memory, and shared making.
kinship
A PRIORI & Prime-Mover
Carbon black. Headless.
The head broke during play by my daughter. Not a failure. A biographical event.
Awaiting repair: pine resin, Sussex iron. Its biography is ongoing.
Mid-act.
Chalk slip from the site of becoming. Shaped in ocean tide.
I followed the land's colour — satellite to Sussex chalk and beach, resonant in the body of this piece.
The unpote form holds memory in its curve. Venus reimagined.
folk specific
At an exhibition in Mayfair I brought the figurines to a room of mid-life women artists, few of whom had ever seen their own bodies represented in art.
The ochre moved from the clay onto their hands.
The circuit that began 29,000 years ago completed quietly in that room.