It's been a while since I last made a journal entry - two years in fact! Pottering around the house this week I thought I would share some of my favourite pieces from this year's work so far.

Possibly my favourite is the tall cylindrical vessel pictured first. It's wood-fired, so it has benefitted from the flame, reduction atmosphere and wood ash inside the kiln. The little black speckles are deposits of fly-ash which (quite literally) fly around the kiln chamber, landing at random to then stick and melt into clay and glaze. I've poured my blue and green wood ash glazes from top to bottom and attached two small handles on either side. I like finding gnarled twigs on my regular walks through a nearby woodland, these twisting coarse bits of discarded nature seem to both compliment and contrast a rustic wood-fired vase like this one.

Next is one of my slim rectangular bottles, pictured alongside the vase. It’s been glazed in green and strokes of blue have been brushed on briskly. It's built from slabs with a thrown top that's attached towards the end of the making process. On this particular piece a crack developed in the body during the firing. It was placed at the top of the kiln where naturally the heat is most intense and was also directly in the flame path coming up from the firebox. Happily I was able to repair the crack using kintsugi. These repairs can go either way and I’m by no means a practised hand - if it was up to me no pieces would crack during the firing! However as sometimes happens I think this slim rectangular bottle has been enhanced by this traditional Japanese repair method.

The final piece I'll explicitly mention is the slim vase formed by the same technique, pictured last. This piece is also wood-fired and glazed in a Shino. Shino glazes are truly peculiar and fundamentally different to every other glaze out there. This difference naturally is down to chemistry. An enormous amount of the mercurial Sodium in their chemical make-up means they can behave in wonderfully unpredictable ways. Indeed many ceramicists have had one or more stormy love affairs with a shino glaze. On this piece it was love at first sight for me, the result was exactly what I had hoped for: A beautiful combination of soft oranges and rich beige tones that contrast with one another so naturally.

I love having ceramic pieces around my home. They bring a real presence to whichever space they occupy. Occasionally I'll pick one up and appreciate its weight, run my fingers across the transition from clay to glaze, turn it over to study the foot of a thrown pot or the underside of a slab-built piece. Inevitably, a maker's mark or some tell-tale sign of the hand that made it reveals itself.

Every now and then - perhaps when the light falls differently, or I'm in an unusual position in the room while vacuuming a neglected corner perhaps - I'll notice something I'd not seen before. It could be a subtle mark in the clay or a break in an otherwise uniform glaze surface. These moments are what I find most extraordinary about ceramics, and art more broadly. Truly great works reveal themselves slowly over time.

This is what I admire most about the ceramic output of the artists who inspired me to begin making six years ago. For them after decades of committing themselves to mastery of this art-form it seems as if all that experience, dedication, skill and love would infuse a few special pieces from a particular firing. Truly great pieces of art will tell their story, will reveal themselves, to the observer slowly over time.

Great art has the ability to tell us about the maker and in that discovery we can simultaneously uncover new parts of ourselves.

This is the true value for me of handmade art, it creates connection between the maker and observer. A deep, powerful human connection. Handmade craft & art are fields of culture and economy that we must protect and support now more than ever. So thank you to all my customers, your support is real. And I'll keep doing my best to create the conditions in which perhaps, just maybe, a few pieces could be made with the potential to make a connection with you.

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