about

 I am a ceramic artist living and working in Cape Town, South Africa.

My work is rooted in a fascination with the body and the microscopic structures that exist within and around us.

This began with a very personal experience. In my twenties, I contracted adult measles and subsequently lost much of my hearing. I became curious about the thing that had caused such a significant and permanent change to my body, and started looking at images of the measles virus under magnification.

I was fascinated by the contradiction. Something so minuscule, and potentially so destructive, could also be incredibly intricate and beautiful.

That curiosity expanded into cells, bacteria, viruses and other microscopic structures — the strange shapes, repetition and patterns that exist at a scale we can't ordinarily see. These forms have gradually found their way into my drawings, prints and ceramics.

I don't try to reproduce them literally. They become starting points: repeated marks, carved surfaces, spots, unusual forms and objects that can feel somewhere between a vessel, an organism and a body.

Clay feels particularly suited to this exploration. It records what happens to it. It can be pressed, carved, distorted, glazed, smoked and burned, and the evidence of those processes remains on the surface.

I'm interested in that tension between beauty and deterioration, permanence and vulnerability, and in the extraordinary influence that something very small can have on something much larger.