Erosion Series

‘Earth to Earth’ inspired a whole series of works that interact with the forces of nature – placing jars in the flow of rivers, letting pots dissolve in tidal pools or be swept from the cliffs by waves. I realised that the unique properties of clay meant that I could capture moments of weather and weathering. I have been layering pots with various clay slips from the surrounding landscape and leaving them out in the rain. The slaked slips run down the surface, individual rain drops leaving small craters in the clay. At a chosen point I take them out of the rain and fix them with fire into a permanent stone state in an attempt to record change, to fix happenings in the world around us into a physical object of relative permanence, like a fossil or photograph encapsulating a moment in the vast history of earth’s cycles. They also capture, I realise, a feeling, a human experience in an object, made by hand from raw earth materials and altered by nature. The properties of clay highlight our intricate relationship with the land and our environment. Crafted and left unfired, clay is a perfect metaphor for the transience of human endeavour.