Unpote: Form, process, surface
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.
Patterns emerge from encounters with waterlight, root, and stone — forms older than language, yet instantly familiar. They are not decoration, but recognition: a shared pulse between the ancient and the present.
Each piece is a companion to flux. It gathers impressions as it travels, resists finality, and remains open to change. What you see is not an ending, but a moment in an ongoing conversation between material, maker, and the more-than-human world.
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.
- Some forms are shaped in tidal shallows or forest floors, each site leaving its own mark.
Firing
- Electric kiln or Clamp kiln firing with Sussex hornbeam.
- 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
- Copilot: writes captions, website content, and archival language—contributes language formed by collective human expression
- Laurie Jeanne: writes from within the work