Experience
I have always liked learning something new and seeing where it takes me.
Before making became my primary practice, I spent ten years working in marketing in the UK, moving between different industries, people and environments. Alongside it, I kept learning. Ceramics became one of those things, as did painting, printmaking, stone carving, ballet, swimming and tennis. Some have stayed with me for years; others I am still very much learning.
I don't really see them as separate things. Each gives me another angle from which to look, another way to experience something I did not know before. I try to bring the same openness to my practice.
Context, Liberty & Care
The more I experience, the more aware I become of how partial my own experience is.
There are lives I will never live, feelings I may never fully understand and choices I would not make myself. I may not always resonate with them either. But I can still take them seriously. I can observe, ask, listen and communicate. I can look for more context before deciding what I think I know.
This is what context means to me. With more context, I find more room for liberty: to feel what I feel, to have options and make my own choices, while allowing somebody else the same room.
And from there comes care. Not necessarily agreement or complete understanding, but the willingness to treat another person's experience and choices with respect.
Making
Making is how I give these thoughts somewhere to go.
I experience something, reflect on it, translate it and share it. What began as one person's experience can take another form and, eventually, become part of somebody else's.
For now, clay is my primary language. My relationship with ceramics has developed through learning and making in London, UK; Seto, Japan; and Jingdezhen, China. I like that clay remembers touch, movement, time and process, and that what I make eventually leaves my hands to be held, used and lived with by somebody else.
I don't expect an object to represent a particular idea, and I don't want to decide how somebody should feel about it. I would rather leave enough room for another experience to happen.
Clay is only the beginning. As the practice develops, words, images, sound and other forms of storytelling may carry what an object alone cannot.
