My ceramics chronicles the ever-changing face of  the built, rebuilt, re-modeled and reused. Creating layers and broken surfaces, laid and over-laid in a constant cycle. I capture images in drawings, collage, print and photography before I translate them into ceramic, to tell a story as well as a form of direct documentation.

 

I photograph and record a moment in time. It is an important starting point in the development of my work, alongside drawing. Buildings have become my vocabulary, in particular post war Brutalist schemes for the optimism and conviction with which they were designed and provides the impetus for my work, recording and celebrating now often undervalued and unappreciated spaces and structures; a commemoration of the dilapidation of buildings and the continuum of one edifice superimposed over another, epitomised by building sites, demolitions and new constructions.

 

Each vessel, vase and plate tells a multi-layered story of urban degradation and renewal as well as of a lost post-war ideal. I use overlapping constructions in my prints and montaged images, enjoying the layering of images and how, with their grid format and repeating elements, they transform and fit onto a form.

Images become abstracted pattern through duplication or fragmentation, but can, on closer inspection, be revealed as the façades of housing projects or sections of familiar landmarks.

 

Using imagery taken from my photographic records, I create a range of large vases and plates, screen-printing directly onto slabs of clay, building up full colour images to achieve rich ceramic surfaces. These are constructed into forms using the slabs of decorated clay as if fabric, that speak about the volume or expanse of buildings and are designed as canvases for the image, elevating and bestowing value to the sites within the images. 

 

WORKS ON PAPER

I also print and paint on paper as well as collage into old books, re-facing them, rather than defacing them, to tell a different story.