clay is life.
What the land gave, what the artist added, and what the fire decided.
Three voices on every surface. None of them interchangeable.
Materials & Methods
How co-experience takes shape.
These vessels are made within the framework of Autobiographical Objecthood — the idea that clay and artist undergo the same event. This page describes the materials and methods through which that co-experience takes place.
Clay is never without water. Even in its firmer states, water binds its particles into macro‑molecular structures that hold together under pressure, yet loosen and drift apart in more dilute tides. I work with this threshold — the limit between shape and non‑shape — coaxing form from the same element that can dissolve it.
Clay Bodies
- Stoneware and Weald clay, iron-rich and locally dug, carrying the mineral record of place.
- Flint grog crushed by hand, echoing Stone Age technology and Sussex geology.
- Sherds gifted by contemporaries, ground into new bodies — shared histories folded into the clay.
- Vessels from the Unpote Series are shaped directly in tidal shallows — the ocean as co-maker.
Firing
- Electric kiln, or community clamp kiln firing with Sussex hornbeam — the kiln hosted, the firing shared.
- Smoke and flame leave their weather on the surface.
- The kiln is not a machine but a collaborator — its mood shifts with the air, the season, the firewood.
lens as collaborator
- Natasa Leoni: coastal interpretation of the Unpote Series; process documentation as companionate witnessing.
- Laurie Jeanne: site-specific archive.
Pigments & Finishes
- South Downs chalk, fungi pigment, and other site-specific materials.
- Surfaces are mapped like weather: drift, fracture, bloom.
- Each is a topography of encounter between mineral, heat, and time.
Nature as Collaborator
- Water shapes, softens, and carries.
- Geology holds ancestral record.
- Time is honoured, not rushed.
language as Collaborator
- Claude: language collaborator — enables expression of concepts developed in conversation with the work.
- Laurie Jeanne: writes from within the work.
The studio is not a room. It is wherever the unpote meets the world. There is no boundary between practice and living studio. There is no separation.