Through vitrified, lyrical combinations of gesture, clay and ash, I hope it works/Material Dances asks us to re-see the things we live with, the things we are intimately familiar with and which we use again and again. These pieces embody narratives of material and maker. Suspended out of time between the act that ‘I’ have done and the work that ‘it’ does, in the cooling kiln, is hope.

100 cups, 100 different forms, 100 unique combinations of ash glaze and clay, You Hold this to Your Lips and Think of Me; one hundred stories I won’t have time to write is an offering of 100 beginnings.

Between these cups are human patterns of process and in each are the traces of my hand. Each handle leaves a space for you and, carrying this touch to your lips, each cup offers the possibility of a story and a vessel for life. The cups are displayed regularly on 10 spalted beech shelves from some of the same woodlands. In a multitude, epic in the domestic, it is an exploration of what a cup is to us. More broadly, as your eyes and hand find your own path, it asks who we are in multiplicity.

Their extraordinary range of colour, from turquoise to blood red is achieved not through oxides mined and extracted at unimaginable human and environmental cost, but through a material which would seem to be at the end of all things, ash. Us is a celebration of this unique possibility. In two large, circular platters, pink ashglaze resultant of the minerals these trees absorbed, pools in the fired traces of the dance of its making. In the space my hand has left, through their scale and shape, they offer hope out of ashes, through commensality, the sharing of food, together.

These are performing objects in terms of both function and theatre. They tell stories.  

This is intensely distilled in Duet, a bar of soap and a dish to hold it, both made with ash left in the wake of wildfires in Greece in the height of summer, 2024.

I travelled to this hot, blackened landscape in Evia days after these devastating fires. Dust clinging to our sweat, I listened to accounts of the verdant island it was, the incremental parching of the land as temperatures rise here and globally and the political, natural and human consequences of these now reoccurring fires.

I washed the ash, skimmed off the caustic lye that bubbles out at first and, ordinarily discarded, used it to make this bar of soap. With the sieved and dried, powdery remnants I make a glaze. It pools in the finger marks of  a momentary act that might just have happened. Performed then with the ease of a jazz musician, I am implicated permanently though the intense heat of the kiln.

Yet unused, a rectangle of soap, willing us to remain in the present, smells only of its composite materials. Its cut edges are an invitation: wash, smooth its corners between your palms and leave the traces of your hand in mine.