Tell us about your pottery journey so far?

Making pottery is my second career. Things really took off when I built my studio in my garden in Sevenoaks in 2009. Until then, I had been attending weekly evening classes after my day job as a Clinical Psychologist. However, after I had my own space, and as my children have grown up, I have been focussing more and more on my pottery practice.

I have always been a creative person and as a child I worked with textiles spending my free time sewing my own clothes and making patchwork quilts as well as dabbling in jewellery and woodwork with my Dad. Textile patterns sometimes influence the patterns that I have created for my ceramics.

How is your work made?

All of my pots start their life by being thrown by hand on the wheel. I then use slip (which is a liquid clay) in different ways to decorate my pots. For my purely functional collections, I stain this slip different colours and use a technique called slip and sgraffito to add colour and etch through with a pin to the clay behind, creating the design – like drawing with a pen. My newer pots are sometimes altered on the wheel and have a white slip with underglaze decoration brushed on them.

After a biscuit firing and the application of a food safe transparent glaze, I fire my pottery to a stoneware temperature – around 1260 ⁰C. This makes them really strong and durable which is ideal for using in the home.

What makes your new collection, Graceful Flow, so different?

I have become aware more recently of the qualities of the material, clay, that I work with. When it is wet and on the wheel, it is plastic and slowly becomes less and less malleable as first it dries out, and then is fired to become like stone.

For me, the idea of fluidity of the wet clay is very interesting and relates to the form or shape of the pot itself. I really want people to focus on the curve of the pot, and the feeling of volume inside the pot itself.

When I brush on the slip, I am very deliberately wanting people to see the detail of the brush strokes. This idea comes from Korean Buncheong ceramics which uses a dark clay and a white slip over the top. I further want to accentuate the movement and feeling of fluidity by using really big brush strokes with underglaze colours.