As a maker of ceramic objects, I keep a keen eye on the history of art and objects of all kinds to use as a primary resource to draw upon in the construction of a language of forms, motifs, patterns and symbols that I use in my work.  I am interested in the history and meanings of patterns and symbols used throughout history and across cultures.  I look for commonalities, contradictions, metamorphosis.  My work in ceramics is not directly derivative of any one particular tradition or movement, but is an expression of a current and personal visual language created by a synthesis of the formal traditions of ceramics and the decorative arts.  I gather and rethink the rules, toss out some, reduce and simplify some, amplify and exaggerate others. 

My work is vessel-oriented, and focuses on the charged spaces occupied by ceramic objects.  Part of the power of a vessel is that it presents to us an expectation of interaction; it tells something about its physicality and how we are to interpret it in those terms.  The spaces inside, above, beside and between vessels are spaces which are charged with this physical energy.  In my work, decorative motifs and patterns are expressed both two-and three-dimensionally and sprout out into these spaces, lifting pattern and images off of the vessels and into these charged, expectant spaces.  Colours, patterns and textures tie together multiples.  Handles change into drawings, drawings change into handles, simplified forms repeat and multiply, marching in order, pushing up and pushing out.  By activating the vessel in this way, the work remixes and reinterprets the formal language of ceramics through exaggeration, abstraction and the rhythm of repetition. 

My earlier training is as a potter.  Making pottery is so much about following established steps in making, and my first instinct is to control the material.  However, too much control can sterilize the work; it becomes task-oriented instead of expressive.  I work to push my sensibilities, loosen my control over what can happen during a process and follow unexpected impulses in order to allow for more discoveries in my studio practice.  My goal is to approach the work in a fresh manner at each stage of making, and to respond to each piece as it is there with me - as a malleable, changeable thing at any point of making.  The result is an accumulation of my decisions, a record of my activity.