About

Image by Laura Martinez

I'm a London-based artist working with clay and drawing to explore how objects hold the shape of what's absent, how making is a form of remembering, and how touch makes things visible. I make because the absent leave a trace. In clay, in memory, in the body. The work is an attempt to find those traces, give them form and find out if touch can reach across time to meet them.

I studied sculpture (BA Fine Art) then spent a decade working with performance artists, through whom I learnt that objects are the residue of an encounter, what remains after something has happened. A further decade in bronze patination taught me the other half: that materials hold memory through fire, chemistry, and touch. A film of my hands working features in On the Sly by Justinien Tribillon currently showing as a film installation at V&A East.

I make touch drawings with eyes closed, my left hand explores an object while my right draws what it feels. I spin, extrude and cast these drawings into 3D forms: memorial vessels spun and slip cast from 3D printed outlines, extrusion dies made from the facial profiles of my matrilineal line. Working with foraged London clay, graphite, charcoal made from local grass seeds, brass and porcelain. Clay Earth Mirrors are burnished until the surface becomes reflective and you can see yourself in the dirt. Forms cast in graphite and clay, the material of pencil lead, so they can leave a trace through touch. I make in an attempt to hold what can't be held.

Based in Walthamstow at Cultivate Artists Studios.