Home

My Story

I have collected contemporary ceramics all my adult life and when I retired from my first life as a family doctor my partner asked me why I didn’t try making rather than just collecting the work of other people. Tentatively I applied for an evening class but I found myself encouraged to go beyond that under the inspiring guidance of Daphne Carnegie at City & Islington College.

Four years later and with a BTEC in my cap I’d run out of options there and applied to Westminster University as a half time BA student. I didn’t know then that it would be the final opportunity to do so. Half time students were asked to speed up and get out in five years instead of six, as tragically the department was to be closed. They started pulling the buildings down before we left. The course was a wonderfully enriching experience with many aspects that I would never otherwise have studied, print making being one that I specially enjoyed.

But the steady development of my own creative language with clay, glazes and fire was my great satisfaction and pleasure – an extraordinary new, second career for me, and a creative outlet to add to my passion for gardening. I can trace the theme that links some of my earliest work at City and Islington through the bottle-kiln inspired, thrown pots that embody my wrestling with the clay and all its admixed grits and colouring oxides. These underlying ideas have informed the progression to smaller works involving the manhandling of less clay as I progress though my 80s and have a much smaller kiln.