A schoolfriend first showed me how to make a coil pot when I was 12 – and making pottery has been part of my life ever since. From the beginning, I’ve been fascinated by the proportions of the different elements of the pot, relationship of base to girth to neck and rim. Increasingly then working with the three dimensionality of a piece, that each pot has infinite points of view. Making on a plinth, I move round as I make, allowing some dance to enter into the pot – symmetricality gives way to balance, flow, and sometimes, elements of incongruity.

Design and making are simultaneous, the form arising as it develops, subject to the limitations of the size of the kiln, and what is possible for the clay. Over the years, a vocabulary of forms and directions has evolved, and continues to evolve.

Glazes are developed experimentally according to the colour and textural responses of different raw materials, and how these interact in layers. Using pouring and brushing, the approach is a kind of abstract expressionism on a curving canvas, in conversation with the shape of the piece.

Making pots for me, is an expression of energy in physical form. So its informed by the landscapes in which I’ve lived, the interactions I’ve experienced, the dance of life.