"I have lived and worked on the Isle of Skye for 25 years and my work is informed and inspired by this powerful landscape. I can’t separate the experience of living here and the way my work has developed. It feels like it’s a journey towards understanding and accepting a path through life and the events that brought me here.
Form and texture have always been the most important elements in my work. It took many years to find and develop a way of combining them which feels fresh and spontaneous but also has tension and control of form. I find it fascinating that patterns which develop as the clay is worked reflect, in small scale, the patterns in the hills, like fractals. The brain is always searching for patterns, trying to make sense of life but it is only by glancing sideways do you see it for a moment.
The pieces are made by hand building, texturing, stretching and carving. Colours are achieved most of all by the firing processes. The soft earthenware blacks and greys of raku firing; wood firing for warm earth tones and glazed stoneware; charcoal saggar firing within the wood kiln for dark greys and matt glazes. This gives me a wide range of textures and densities of surface and body, reflecting the varied geology of the land.
I love the feel of raw clay in my hands and the connection it gives me to the physical world - a visceral process, not always comfortable, often challenging and increasingly tiring. It is a medium demanding practical solutions which balances the introspection that comes from working alone. I have learned to give precedence to the physical process over and above intellectual input, allowing my inner senses to give voice to the work. But I also love understanding the complex chemistry of the ceramic process, and the history of the material and its domestic uses, how it connects one human being to another, a bowl passed from hand to hand."
