Statement

Disparate paths across ceramics, science, and entrepreneurship converge through a shared search — for patterns, rules, and the quiet logic of material. Early work in ceramics during the 1980s gave way to decades of scientific exploration, leading research in ecology, microfluidics, synthetic biology, fusion & spaceflight physics. Yet making, particularly with clay, remained—a latent memory of silence, resistance, and form.

Now, through vessel-making, sculpting heads and mixed media panels, a familiar discipline returns. The values honed in science — rigour, iteration, respect for constraints — find echoes in the  practice of making. Each vessel, each head, each panel,  becomes a study in presence and restraint, shaped by hand rather than hypothesis.

This visual language extends into two dimensions, through recent graphical works. Often centred, subdued, and weathered, they function as modern reliquaries - not of relics, but of traces. Each one holds a silence, a surface rubbed back to the threshold of disappearance. These are not pictorial works. As with the vessels and sculpted heads they are encapsulations of time. Like parchment worn by centuries of touch, they carry the suggestion of something once present - so that, in the pause, another might feel the echo of their own inwardness.

Influences include the anonymous purity of ancient forms, the restrained poise of Coper, the weathered asymmetry of Kamoda, the architectural stillness of Nicholson and the existential quiet of Giacometti and Frink. These works resist explanation, are their own language, as are ones own works. They aspire to that quiet inexpressive stillness of Berenson’s ‘itness’: signals of potential, a distilled tension, an unresolved stillness.

The works are not a retreat from science, nor a return to clay, but a refinement of attention. A listening, where memory, material, and method converge.

Recent works – sculpted heads and paintings – explore intersentient states: between presence and program, between the organic and the made. These figures are neither resolved nor explained; they hold a stillness before cognition, a signal before language. The ceramic vessel, the figure, the reliquary – all become sites of distilled attention

Process 1

Vessels and sculpted heads are formed from refined white and red coarsely grogged clays, sometimes as ‘wild ‘ clay blends, thrown silently on a momentum wheel, turned, and sometimes modelled or composited from separately made elements. Surfaces are incised, beaten, abraded, brushed with soft clay-slip and burnished. Most surface texture is removed allowing only parts to remain. The process is repeated.

Texture is further developed with layers of oxides and engobes, sanded and burnished. Works are once fired in an oxidizing kiln to 1258C, Orton cone 9 over 36-48 hours. Fired pots may be rubbed with pumice, carborundum or cerium oxide. When work on a vessel ceases, what remains is a collected residue of sensations, filtered-saved-held-vitrified. Some heads are carved in stone, usually oolitic limestone.

Process 2

Graphical works comprise mixed media on paper, canvas, board and plaster using pencil, charcoal, acrylic, raw pigments, binders and occasionally found objects. Each is an experiment, a search for fundamentals, touchstones, even a resolution - but probably doomed to failure. But failure gives purpose. Each ‘reliquary’ attempts to be a collected residue of sensations from one man’s brief journey through fragments of time, collected, recorded, embodied.