November 2025
w/c 3 November 2025
Letting the Hand Lead
Back to playing this week - returning to sketchbook and paper, inks and loose mark-making, allowing myself to respond instinctively to the landscape around home. It feels both exciting and uncomfortable, as if I’m gently prising open a door I’ve kept firmly shut for a long time.
These marks are not about representation, but about rhythm, breath and memory - the movement of wind across fields, the soft rise and fall of the land, the quiet pulse of being present. I’m realising that my most meaningful gestures come when I stop thinking and simply let the hand lead.
It feels unfamiliar, exposing even - but also necessary. This is where something true might be hiding, just waiting to be found.
w/c 10 November 2025
Distilling the Landscape
A bit of excitement this week as ‘Where Winter Breathes’ went off to its new home. It now sits between a stunning vessel by Kento Anzai and a statement piece by Andrew Crouch, alongside work by Lisa Hammond, Victoria Meadows and Akiko Hirai. Seeing it in such company is both surreal and affirming - a reminder of why I’m pursuing this journey with such determination.
Back in the studio, however, things have been far less serene. I’ve been wrestling with my next form: a larger, more dynamic vessel that I hoped would push me out of my comfort zone and into a bolder, more sculptural direction. Instead, it quickly ran away from me. After looking at it with fresh eyes on Thursday morning, I made the rather drastic decision to cut away nearly a third of the width. Immediately it gained a new sense of drama and intention, but there is still a long road of building and refining ahead. It’s a steep learning curve and this piece may well end up as reclaim - but even that feels valuable. Each misstep is teaching me more about scale, proportion and the dialogue between form and surface.
Lately I’ve been asking myself what would happen if I stripped my vessels right back. What if, instead of flowing organic shapes, I reduced the landscape to its most essential lines and movements? What if the form became the distilled structure - a quiet foundation - and the surface became the place where memory, rhythm and movement breathe? This tension between reduction and expression is pulling me in possibly new and exciting directions.
What’s inspiring me this week
I’ve found myself drawn to the ceramic forms of Martin Smith, whose precision and architectural clarity encourage me to consider how structure alone can carry meaning. Alongside this, the subtle and atmospheric ceramic surfaces of Helen Johannessen continue to prompt me to think about how a pared-back palette can still hold depth, nuance and emotion.
I’ve also been revisiting the work of Philip Hughes, an artist I’ve admired for many years. His ability to distill the landscape into essential blocks of form, colour and composition feels directly relevant to where my own practice is heading. Hughes doesn’t depict the landscape as it looks, but as it is - reduced to its underlying rhythms and structures. In many ways, our intentions overlap. While he translates this distilled language onto canvas, I am attempting to translate it into sculptural form: reducing the landscape to contour, movement and the bare bones of shape, then allowing the surface mark-making to reintroduce its emotional resonance. His work reminds me that simplicity is not a limitation - it’s a form of clarity.
w/c 17 November 2025
Tracing Frozen Whispers
With the dramatic drop in temperature this week, the frozen puddles reappeared on the daily dog walk - each one a little world of intricate swirls, fractures and delicate lines. These quiet, fleeting patterns always stop me in my tracks. They feel so full of movement and stillness at the same time, and I would love to find a way to translate these frozen whispers into clay.
Coincidentally, a few days before the cold arrived I had already begun a new porcelain coiled form in my home studio - the first in what I hope will become a deeper exploration of how to express the textures and sensations of these winter surfaces. It’s a slow, steady, very mindful build and I’m curious to see how the porcelain will carry these ideas as it grows.
At university, I’ve also been challenged to scale up my sculptural vessels rooted in memories of place. This has been quite an undertaking - and a steep learning curve. The larger form is still very much in progress: it needs thoughtful refinement before I can even begin to consider how the surface will be treated. At this stage, I’m not yet sure how successful it will be, but the process itself is proving invaluable.
Meanwhile, my current series of test tiles has become a playground for exploring how the graphic rhythms from my sketchbook might translate onto clay. I’m experimenting with slips, engobes, stains, coloured clays and an ever-growing assortment of mark-making tools - essentially anything within reach. It’s a deeply satisfying process, full of endless possibilities and feels like another step toward bringing the landscape - its structures, textures and quiet gestures - more fully into my work.
