Artists Statement:
I love the ‘visible imperfections’ that come from the gestures of throwing and handling clay and the fierce symmetries of industrial porcelain, the vessels of the chemical laboratory. My pots span both these histories. Working in Japan has given me a feeling for how pots can work in the hand, how their heft, balance and texture matters. So my pots are slightly bashed, slightly crooked and tell of their making.For the last eight years I have also been making installation groups. I called them ‘cargoes’ of pots, an image that came from the images of sunken cargoes of porcelain.
There are few images of groups of porcelain – we are much more used to seeing single pieces in isolated splendour – and this has haunted me. Some of these installations were for Modernist houses as with my work at High Cross House in 1999. Some were for austere art galleries – as with the Porcelain Room made for the Geffrye Museum, 2002-2003 and shown at the Kunstindustri Museum in Copenhagen in 2004. For my solo show at Roche Court in 2004 I made three installations that respond to the Arcadian landscape in which the gallery sits. This focus on installation has allowed me to be ambitious in making pots that challenge architectural space. My installation groups focus on the ways in which subtle modulations are manifested through repetition.
Recent projects at Blackwell, the Lake District mansion designed by Baillie Scott and at the National Museum and Gallery, Wales have extended this practice.
Much of my recent work explores colour through hidden interstices and openings. These pieces look at how colour change through shadow.
All these pots were made in porcelain as I believe that it is the porcelain that is the matrix for East and West, the sung dynasty and the Bauhaus.
It remains to a powerfully contemporary medium.
