This Gallery shows some of my hand-built ceramic sculptures and pots along with works in procelain.

This has to be my greatest love among my artistic creations. Unfortunately the most difficult to just do wherever you are. If forced to you can paint anywhere but with ceramic work there needs to be space and a kiln at the very least. Circumstances have not allowed me to carry on with this love of mine but I am hopeful that there will be a chance in the not too distant future.

Ceramics are not easy, there are so many things that can go wrong and when creating the larger Sculptures a long time is spent on their creation. Most of mine have taken between six to ten weeks to complete, then they need to dry and when at their most vulnerable moved into a kiln. My sculpture ‘Image of Woman’ or I should say the half of her was initially a woman kneeling but during the move from my car to the studio and then the kiln a very slight knock on the side of the bench, where she was to await the kiln, as I lifted her up and half of her was destroyed in seconds. I was able to catch the upper part of her and she survived the firing.

Many ceramic sculptures and pots do not survive firings, all it takes is one pot to implode and many are ruined. Just one air bubble can mean disaster in a kiln. For the sculptures and pots I usually use a very sturdy clay called Crank, it contains particles of brick and rocks to give it a wonderful textured surface when fired.

The glazes were all, with the exception of the Raku Pot, made using clay I dug up from around the countryside in Kent, UK along with ash from a variety of trees from which I was able to make my own glaze. This was a very exciting prospect, bringing two things together and awaiting the results on the sculptures. They were all such earthy colours and textures.

My porcelain pots gave me something that my clay pots could not, instant satisfaction. Whereas with the clay pots it was built slowly as it could only take so much wet weight before it would bend so you can only build so far and then wait until dry enough to continue and take the weight of the next lot of clay, with the porcelain I could use a gas burner, fold the rolled out porcelain and literally just wrap or fold it together and it stayed in place ready for firing.