Title of work: Red Stack

I have always been interested in objects, ever since my grandmother Esmé encouraged me to use her fluted bone china teacups and saucers. They were powder blue with a whisper of gold on their delicate rims and I loved their weight, their elegance and their gentle sound when placed together. My early memories of these beautiful vessels and their use have inspired and informed my work for more than 30 years.

Science and music were my initial areas of learning, but my attention swiftly diverted after my first entrancing contact with clay. I immediately realized that making pots was what I wanted to do for ever. I studied at the Harrow Studio Pottery Course in London. Intense and demanding, focused and structured, we concentrated on the making of high quality inventive functional objects. The structured working practices, high expectations and inventive questioning, similar to science and music, were familiar and attractive to me. I excitedly explored many techniques and ideas but throwing always remained my technique of choice.
I learned to recognize the wonder and mystery of objects – their power to incite a response in me, to move and stimulate me, to draw me towards them and to dwell permanently in my memory.
Studios in London and then Melbourne contained the development of my work through coloured and painted earthenware and eventually to reduction fired porcelain.
Gradually new approaches to making emerged, motivated by a search for simplicity and quietness. A lovely soft luminous clay body provided surfaces that no longer required decoration to conceal them and new forms developed – circular altered to oval with softly moving edges, a sprung tension recalling their thrown origins.