My relationship with ceramics began long before I ever touched clay.

I grew up in the Midlands, spending weekends in Stoke-on-Trent, once the heart of British ceramics. As a teenager I desperately wanted to escape the Potteries; they felt inseparable from deindustrialisation, decline and the anxiety of downward mobility. Returning to ceramics became a way of reconnecting with that history, recognising how it shaped me and finding a sculptural language to tell that story.

My forms are shaped by experiences of precarity; the feeling that everything could collapse at any moment. The work is unstable, leaning, top heavy, improbable. Only a matter of time before it falls over. Ash is central to the work both materially and symbolically. Ash is residue. Using ash to glaze the work embodies the attempt to build something beautiful from what remains after loss. The work holds both of these realities simultaneously: the constant fear of collapse and the ability to rebuild.