I create salt glazed pots in porcelain and stoneware, including functional as well as one-off decorative or sculptural pieces.  My work is mainly thrown and finished on the potter’s wheel, sometimes later altered and assembled.   I strive to make each piece an individual, including when part of a series, such as mugs, bowls or cups.

I have collected ceramics from a young age, regularly visiting Portobello and Bermondsey Market at 6am, hunting for 18th century European porcelain and 17th/18th century Chinese ceramics.  My making came later, but I feel it is influenced by the pieces I bought, studied and have loved over the years.  The ceramics of the 17th and 18th century are a rich source of ideas and inspiration; it was a period of great innovation, growth and creativity in Europe, and of exquisite ceramics in Asia, with the added sharing of ideas between East and West that came through the rapid growth of the export trade during that time.  

I am drawn to making techniques that celebrate a pot’s journey, those that reveal the maker’s hands and the wheel, the essence of a hand-made vessel.  In the past ‘mark making’ tended to the precise, using turning machinery, aimed at clean and consistent results.    In my own approach to making I have crafted wooden tools that I use to throw the pot on the wheel, while the clay is still wet. This evokes the marks of turning, the softness and spinning of the clay on the wheel, and reveals a story or evidence of its making on the finished piece. The profiles on these tools are mostly influenced by architectural detail on buildings I have visited over the years, but the effect of the banding they create on the pots I find particularly rewarding, suggesting on the one hand support, protection, safety and security, but at other times perhaps a constraint, confinement or caging.   

The whole process of making salt-glazed ceramics is desperately hard work, but for me salt-glazing produces a shine and texture that can’t be matched by conventional high-fired glazing techniques and is well worth the effort.  It offers great creative potential with its characteristic texture of subtle or marked pitting orange peel effect.   Salt-glaze is perfectly transparent and it does not remove or dull the mark making in the pieces, which suits my making perfectly.   Whilst the salt firing process is time consuming, and will eventually corrode and destroy my kiln, I like the drama the firing offers, particularly when salt is introduced into the red-hot kiln, and feel it somehow brings me closer to the creation of the work. It is also link to and celebration of the past makers, as the salt-glazing technique is largely unchanged since its beginnings in the 15th century.

My work focuses on the familiar, taking it forward with a dash of humour and an oblique nod to its source. At its best I feel this approach produces freshness and vibrancy, and the everyday can become something unique and individual, with its own character. I am most happy with a finished piece that makes me smile, that might be an old friend and that I find myself seeking out.

I am a graduate of Clay College Stoke and in 2019 I set up my studio in the Weald of Kent, close to the Castle in Sissinghurst. 

During the months of ‘lockdown’ in 2020 I have built a new salt kiln, with the very generous advice and encouragement (safely distanced by phone) of Joe Finch, Walter Keeler, and Steve Harrison; the first a master kiln builder and the latter both eminent salt-glaze masters. 

In October, I fired the kiln for the first time with very encouraging results.  A salt kiln needs to be ‘seasoned’ before it delivers its best; the initial firings will coat the bricks with a layers of glaze that seals them and offers a salt-glaze back onto the pots in future firings. This is a process that improves with further firings.