When I walked to primary school in the 1960s through pristine Perth bush land along a narrow, sandy, dappled path my toes would always end up being speckled with tiny carbon spots of decayed vegetation. No matter how carefully I trod, my white sandals would be dirtied with the fine black dust. The path and the bush no longer exist but the memories of the bush and the sandy ground with the tiny black carbon flecks of disintegrating leaf matter and the plants they fell from remain with me and whenever I step into similar bushland I am restored.

These ceramic cups with their black speckled, layered and laminated clay forms grounded me in memories of this place. Each cup approached individually, hand-built one by one, paring back story, become places of peace in themselves. I am never quite sure which story I am telling or what the result with be like until the work is fired. The relationship between narrative, spirituality, and expressed form intrigues me. Pursuing various possibilities of artmaking, I often seem to arrive at the first place, albeit with a different perspective and from a different path.

Clay is a challenging and inviting medium to work with and readily facilitates exploration. Surface, form, glaze and firing each contribute to the finished piece which is in fact not finished until it is beheld and held.

Artists like Gwyn Hansen Piggott inspired me to begin with clay when I heard her thoughtful reflections, Ewen Henderson’s rough work showed me to take risks and Lucy Rie’s single fired forms and glazes illuminate what is possible with less.