This is part of a series of blogs featuring inspiring makers who work with local natural materials.
Intimacy with the landscape, the living world, plants, earth, other creatures, has always been meaningful to me as a place of connection and belonging. So it feels completely natural to create with these materials. On an aesthetic level I feel a kinship with the textures and colours; with handling and manipulating clay and plant fibres. I think it’s in our DNA as humans to use our hands to create with these materials. I’m a gardener, growing flowers and fruit, and caretaking the places where I gather my materials. I have to work and create with my hands, it’s a kind of compulsion, an existential need. My practice means spending time outdoors in the natural world, often wandering and observing, it feels like home. I pay attention to the plants, the tress and sky; animals around me, the birds and the insects. The sensory experience of the whole process is a strong feature in my practice.
I feel strongly about not adding more stuff to the world, so working with materials and processes which are essentially low impact and degradable, pretty much a circular system, sits comfortably with my ecological concerns.
I live in Sussex at the foot of the Downs; I grew up near the Chilterns, which are also chalk; the ecosystems of both places are really similar, so I’m familiar with the plants, I’ve known them all my life. I’ve spent a lot of time in the last 10 years exploring which plants can be used for weaving, extracting fibres, creating forms.
In Sussex we’re also part of the Weald, an area rich in clay. I’ve sampled clays from many different sites and found ones that have good plasticity and integrity, and are clean enough to work with straight from the ground. I hand build, mainly using the coiling technique, in my small garden studio. I fire my pieces outdoors in the woods, either open firings or clamp kiln firings, producing low fired earthenware. The process is physical and elemental, it mirrors the very origins of ceramics- earth, wood and fire. It’s unpredictable and I like this, removing control and allowing all the variables to come into play- the weather, the firewood, the clay that came straight out of the ground only a few metres from the fire.
Plant-wise, I work with bramble, bark, rush, reeds, grass, wild rose, various leaves. I mostly forage my own materials but sometimes source from other people who harvest in larger quantities. There’s a certain insecurity inherent in relying on foraging my materials- availability varies from year to year depending on the growing conditions. I live in a densely populated county and many of my materials come from marginal places. These places are under threat from cultivation, development etc. Although I caretake as I harvest, to support the plants’ health and vigour, sometimes I’ll go to gather and find everything unexpectedly cut back by a landowner. I have a mind map of plants around where I live; it probably extends to about a 20-mile radius, but wherever I go I’m always looking around at what’s growing where, and how it’s doing.
I use a wide variety of basketry techniques, whichever works best for the plant material at hand. I don’t have a preferred method/material; I appreciate the variety and the challenge of a broad approach. The techniques have been used by humans for millennia and remain more or less unchanged. Sometimes when I’m making, I have a sense of being part of a lineage, a continuum of makers that stretches back to distant palaeolithic times; it’s mysterious and moving.
I’m interested in the dialogue between myself, my hands, and the materials. There’s often a good deal of trial and error involved in the process of making, as I get familiar with it. Sometimes I make series of pieces, often I make pieces that are one-off, responding to the particularities of the material. I’m drawn to making vessel forms. There’s a certain fullness and stillness that resonates, creates a sense of presence. The space within, a fertile void; the outer form a skin under tension: a dynamic between the two that is compelling.
In recent years I’ve made a couple of large-scale site-specific sculptural pieces, using materials foraged on site: a 7-metre-high archway in ancient woodland, and a suspended netted structure made of 70 metres of hay rope, both at Wakehurst, Kew. I relished the challenge of the open briefs of those works, responding to the place and the plants.
My current work is smaller: coiled grass vessels, various types of grass, and clay vessels. Pieces on a domestic scale, for interiors. Covid restrictions over the past year have given me more studio time; much of my work is often running courses in the woods for adults, supporting them in foraging materials to make baskets and pots. I get a lot of satisfaction from facilitating these experiences for people; I’ve also appreciated having more time recently to get into the rhythm of my own making.
My woodland courses season runs April- November, in Sussex, details on my website. I sell work through my website shop once or twice per year, and sometimes show work elsewhere. I send updates about all this via a monthly-ish newsletter https://nativehands.co.uk/subscribe-to-newsletter/
www.nativehands.co.uk @nativehands.uk