I’ve always been a maker. I suppose part of it was having a practical father and growing up in post-war Britain with its make-do mentality. Saturday morning kids’ cinema with Flash Gordon led to ray guns using scraps from Dad’s shed with its boxes of salvaged screws and grommets. Later on, handicraft at school directed me towards an initial career as a woodwork teacher. When I discovered clay, which was one of those life-changing events, it was a natural shift from using slabs of wood to using slabs of clay and taking more school to become an Art teacher.

It’s easy to see the ‘Design’ heritage in my work; the planned formal relationships of line and space. However much I admire loose, direct work and make forays into working that way I always come back to a modernist consideration of spatial relationships and a careful abstraction and refining of forms.

For some time my work has been an ultimate abstraction of pure sculptural statement involving elements that I had previously used for pieces that had semi-functional aspects within the vessel tradition. These often drew from diverse cultural references with strong suggestions of some suggested ritual significance.

Currently I am moving beyond self-imposed limits towards a wider consideration of form, more organically inspired and non-geometric but still within a formalist approach. These new pieces, massive hollow forms are essentially carvings, working from small, carved solid firebrick maquettes, translated into mostly slabbed planes which are then detail carved to the finished forms.