My practice explores the deep connections humans have to place and landscape. I’m interested in how materials can act as identity markers, influencing the way in which we view ourselves and the world around us through the imprinting of emotion and memory onto our surroundings.
My work encapsulates the rugged beauty of my home landscape – a quarrying village in north Wales – by using the physical characteristics of Welsh slate and other locally sourced materials.
This involves exploring the full potential of slate by incorporating it with ceramic processes to create objects that depict forms of the land as part of a circular process whereby I have been personally shaped by my surrounding landscape form and shape its raw materials. A process of sculpting the materials which have sculpted me.
These features are reflected in the shapes of the slate through high firing and in the patterns and colours of the ceramics created through glazes made from slate and other collected materials such as heather and the gorse flower.