Working with natural materials such as biomaterials and clay, I aim to reflect my thinking about processes of decay, life, transience, and the visceral/abject as a means of discovering the body and thinking about home and belonging as an attempt to channel my current lived experience, being a woman who has just been evicted from her home.

I’m currently living in a state of flux, on a plot of land which I have just been evicted from and will be redeveloped – moving to London has made me far more aware of our ever-changing surroundings and landscape, and I’ve been reading this as an external iteration of the cyclical nature of living inside a female body. I have viewed my current home through the lens of archiving the building, through my book, 64 Speedwell Street; I photographed the building I live in, contrasting the graffiti and remaining signs from the previous squatters with the new signs of life from my current housemates and I, two different versions of home. Similarly, I have attempted to capture the feeling of being in my very own meat-sack home through the ceramic Gummy Matrix set, a lumpy, abstracted version of a uterus and ovaries, stained using menstrual blood; attempting to capture this introspective feeling within an external physical object, in another way a form of archiving.

Also existing in a post-studio practice (and in unstable housing situations), I have to consider my work as something impermanent and allowing to let go of work (or rotting) as the only sustainable and accessible way of continuing my practice currently. Although without a studio, I have various sites of making, including a shared ceramics space, my kitchen, the garden and my bedroom, all of which lend themselves to different modes of creation. Physically working within my home has allowed me to better tap into themes of belonging and physical existence/taking up space, and over the past year, the majority of my works have responded to, and at some point have been installed at the building I live in, such as Here but not really here, and Spiraling up and down. Much like Jen Calleja speaks of the ‘grotto’ within her book “Goblin Hood: Goblin as a Mode”, my home has become an ever-evolving mass of materials and substances, and a site of existence as well as experimentation. Living around my work has made me far more attuned to it as a part of my daily life, something built into me, like an extra limb.

Further to observing cycles in subject matter, I’ve also been embracing this in process by working with materials such as clay and bioplastics made from food waste, which go through phases of different material states, in some cases resulting in total decay, such as my alginate yarn pieces, which are currently still in phases of development. Working with materials such as alginate yarn, I have documented its process and life from the point of creation through to drying out, becoming brittle and rotting, through photographs and writing. Working in biomaterials has also felt linked to the abject as a concept, and inspired me to lean into the organic, curvaceous lines and forms which are also present within my ceramic pieces (such as the squiggle bowl and vase), as well as drawings such as Grey Matter. These lines are synonymous with the unruly alginate strands, all of which relate to the body; intestines, movement, bodily functions, and manifesting in the a beauty with a brain too! piece, constructed using raspberry dyed alginate strands and a handmade ceramic bowl. It’s all very visceral and feels akin in form to the offal photographs which Helen Chadwick had produced. I’ve also worked directly with bodily fluids, such as menstrual blood in ceramic glaze and alginate, which has brought me closer to this concept. Working in this medium also moves me further from Berger’s historical ‘gaze’, by refocusing the experience of the work through senses other than looking (i.e., in ‘body feel’ as discussed in Lucy Lippard’s essay “Eccentric Abstraction”) and so also feels radical in that it’s a subversion of this male-dominated and oppressive view on women in art.

Having a large background of working in textiles at university, specifically crocheting, knitting and weaving, I keep these processes in my practice as attempts of control, and a belief that I can exist in the right place at the right time. Most obviously manifested in Everything in its right place, where a woven swatch has been reproduced and risograph printed, but also in the Knitsugi vase, where a ceramic vase was cut into pieces and then later stitched together again, a process of destruction and repair. There’s a sense of comfort in these techniques in that each stitch has to be formulated in a particular way and creates a structure of orderliness – and so by attempting to replicate these stitches and weavings with such unruly materials such as alginate yarn or clay/fired ceramic, I feel as though I am replicating how it feels to tame the body or the changing landscape of the metropolis, which is ultimately impossible and pointless. Thus, hoping to evoke a sense of gooeyness, cycles and flow.

March 2025