My work tells the stories before I’ve found the words for them, and I spend my time catching up.

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One question keeps returning, and I’ve never finished answering it: how do separate things become part of a whole? I find it everywhere - in families, in ecosystems, in the way objects sit together in a room, and it’s the thing that pulls me back to the studio.

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Before clay, I worked as a floral designer, and that way of seeing is still with me - I build the way a florist arranges, composing forms until they belong together. I rarely make single objects. I make forms in relation - pieces that lean and balance, that need one another and share a space rather than sitting alone. Porcelain petals crowding out of dark stoneware. Spined, coiled bodies. Most of it is local clay, dug and formulated from the land around me, shaped by hand - pinched, pushed and pulled into form. Each clay has its own temperament, and I do what it asks: I listen with my hands, and obey the message. I leave the surfaces raw or washed with oxide so the earth they came from stays visible.

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I work from El Tuito in the hills of Jalisco, Mexico - Australian by origin, most myself near tropical mountains and a clear horizon. I know something about looking for where you belong - I take the work out of the studio and into unexpected places, to see where else it might belong.

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Beauty is essential to me, though not only as decoration. It’s how I pay attention to belonging  to holding on, to how we hold together.

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