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Other Stuff

Here you can see a selection of other works, much of it ceramic. For me, art is like rummaging in a cupboard full of memories; saved packaging, scraps of paper, text and art historical imagery from which I extract the starting blocks from which new work evolves. My work references and is inspired by things seen in museums and galleries, in the media and the built environment, from things found or acquired, or from what I have read or heard. I see connections, make leaps of imagination, cross contaminate and conflate things not usually conjoined. Art is about having the courage to see common things with uncommon eyes.

My work is a map of my life; much of it is about re-looking, remembering, and a kind of misunderstanding of reality. But it is also of the present. I think the most interesting work takes place between categories. I love detail and delight in colour, pattern and combinations, whether it is ceramics, printing, fabric, or jam. Or pyjamas. My studio is a laboratory for thought, reconfiguring the world into a new certainty. Everything that happens there is part of my everyday life.

My So’Bosch Ceramics came out of a sudden desire to make the Red Branched Tent found in the central panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights. Since 2008 I have intermittently made more Bosch inspired pieces with the goal of creating an environment of Bosch objects. Bosch’s painted world is a landscape of differing scales, and incorrect placement.  It is also a place of rich colour, of one thing standing in for another. And for confusion. You can read more about my So'Bosch work in an essay Why So'Bosch in News & Articles

In my interpretation of Billy Wilder’s 1959 romantic comedy, Some Like It Hot, the transparency of film is exchanged for the solidity of ceramics. The handmade ceramic objects form a theatrical restaging where the physical thingness of the objects means they occupy space and become votive offerings that echo the themes of the film; love, friendship, hope, desire, ambition, the past, the future.

I find working with clay liberating. I love the push and pull of it as a medium, what I can imagine creating and what turns out is exciting. The disjuncture between it’s mutability and it’s own agenda in the kiln.