Ceramics shown as part of Paris Internationale 2020 with Ciaccia Levi Gallery 

These ceramic works are an attempt to pay homage to some of the animals and beings that populate my drawings, such as weasels, dogfish and in this case adders.  

Through immortalising these beings in clay, I was interested in the idea of the animal as figurine or icon and how these have been utilised in different cultural contexts, but especially in relation to the ‘ornament’. I wanted to distort this idea slightly by trying to instil the animals with the sense of unruly and excessive power, through their embellishments and exaggerated expressions, so that they are not just seen as passive objects.

Through glaze and form I try to make the ceramic surfaces sing out in excess, trickling over from decoration and adornment and flirting with the grotesque. I love the way that ceramics can capture a kind of exclamation of feeling, the not quite correct aspect of animal expressions captured and turned into an object in a way that fails to attend to the reality, but tries to pronounce it. There is something lost in translation and also tender about this process.