Non-representational

Garden of Eden 1

This is a detail of the first piece in my Garden of Eden series, from a installation with the painter Maciej Urbanek (www.urbanek.co.uk). Concept information in the overview.

Garden of Eden 2

This is one piece of the three Garden of Eden series works. Explanation is with the overview.

Blue Delilah

Delilah undid Samson through intimacy; Alexander cut what he could not solve. This knot refuses both, a continuous form that offers no beginning, no end, no point of severance. Broken fragments in Madonna blue cover its surface, devotion and seduction reassembled. Weight: Approx. 100kg

They Wear People’s Souls

Amber teething beads for toddlers, a necklace of teeth for the victor, glass beads used for exchange for people’s lives in the slave trade: a record of humanity no longer present.

Raft of the Medusa

The interior is clawed out, leaving a glossy landscape of finger marks. The raw, matte exterior creates a silent boundary for the chaos within.

Prime Numbers

Searching for the most elemental intra-action between person and clay. Divisible only by itself and one.

Health, Wealth, Virtue, Long Life and an Easy Death

The title wants everything. It catalogues desire without hierarchy, stacking blessings until they buckle under their own weight. Health and wealth, virtue and longevity, and then the final demand: an easy death. But long life and easy death pull in opposite directions. The wish contains its own impossibility. Getting what you want and getting what […]

$The title wants everything. It catalogues desire without hierarchy, stacking blessings until they buckle under their own weight. Health and wealth, virtue and longevity, and then the final demand: an easy death. But long life and easy death pull in opposite directions. The wish contains its own impossibility. Getting what you want and getting what you wish for are rarely the same thing. The fortune cookie exists to be broken. Its purpose is destruction: crack, extract, discard. These works refuse that economy. Two cookies, approximately twenty centimetres each, their familiar forms made unfamiliar. The proportions suggest memory but deliver presence, too generous, too insistent to be dismissed as a replica. What was designed for a second's consumption now demands sustained attention. The doubling compounds the greed encoded in the title: one fortune is never enough. A white crackle glaze fractures across each convex shell, fissures revealing warm stoneware beneath. The cracks read as text without language, an alphabet of heat and time that the eye pursues but cannot decode. A rim of 14-carat gold traces the outer edges, not decoration but threshold, marking where the edible becomes eternal. From each inner lip spill entrails of red thread, dense and weighted. What should be hidden, the cookie's interior, has been pulled outward and made visible. The fortune is no longer a slip of paper but a visceral excess, the object unable to contain what it carries. Clay petrifies the ephemeral. Gold sanctifies the disposable. Threads replace paper. The cookies cannot break. The fortunes cannot be read. The familiar gesture, crack, unfold, consume, has been rendered impossible. The work holds these tensions without resolving them, suspending biscuit, ritual, jest, and prophecy in sumptuous material form.$

I bite clay

Or ‘Midas’s Touch’ takes its inspiration from the Phrygian king whose golden curse originated across the Aegean from Rhodes, in the mythological landscape of Anatolia. A lump of wedged earthenware holds a single bite: teeth meeting clay in the body’s most intimate gesture. The impression is sealed in transparent glaze and 14ct gold lustre; the […]