What I do:
I am a studio potter currently based in York, with a fascination for prehistoric archaeological art and ceramic design of northwestern Europe, specifically material culture from the Late Mesolithic and Early Neolithic. My creative identity is underpinned by a love for the regenerative disposition and materiality of life, death, the natural world, anthropogenic things, and how all of these are inherently inseparable. This manifests in my work as pottery allows for me to engage with an ancient technology (which I firmly believe has always been a form of art), tied to human creativity and technical skill, whilst also allowing me to utilise the natural materials local to me.
I mainly produce wheel-thrown decorative vessels, urns and smaller objects and create my own ash glazes from trees, shrubs or seaweed and animal remains such as shells and bone which I’ve procured locally. My aim is to combine these aspects of modern ceramic design with the complex beauty of prehistoric archaeological artistic expression of European Mesolithic/Neolithic cultures, seen across prehistoric ceramics, jewellery and rock art.
How did I get here?
Other than being initially born, I was introduced to ceramic design as a teenager during my foundation Art and Design degree at York College where I was taught how to wheel-throw by Edward Poxon. My curiosity in studio pottery lead to me graduating from The Sheffield Institute of Arts at Sheffield Hallam in 2021, where I received my Ba(Hons) in Product Design. This is where I properly specialised in ceramics, and afterwards I began to work as a studio potter in my own (at the time rather rudimentary) studio, where I began experimenting with various aesthetic choices, clay bodies, glazes and vessel forms. As of 2024, I completed an MA in Material Culture and Experimental Archaeology at the University of York. Here I researched prehistoric artistic expression of the European Mesolithic and Neolithic, contextual to relevant material culture throughout the archaeological record by applying my technical abilities in ceramic design and experimental archaeology to unravel existing questions of the ceramics of Prehistoric European Mesolithic hunter-gatherer cultures.
