I have made a full-time living as an artist since 1998, making one-off clay sculptures and limited-edition sculptures in my studio on the edge of the Peak District.

I completed a Fine Art Sculpture course in 1983 and had little experience of fired ceramics up to that point. I was used to modelling solid in clay and then making a plaster mould. When I started my ceramics studio in 1998, there was a big learning curve!

I started out by press-moulding a collection of abstracted animal sculptures to make small-scale limited edition runs. If you have one of these, they are possibly quite rare by now.

After a few years of press-moulding I had a strong desire to try hand-building and be more freely creative, making individual, unique clay sculptures. This is what I now concentrate on.

In 2005, I attended a short course run by the wonderful Ian Gregory, who didn’t really accept the normal ‘rules’ – developing his own hand-building techniques and making his own kilns. Ian’s method was to support the wet clay with a system of rods, only taking these out once the clay could hold its own weight. 

I have adapted Ian’s method a little by incorporating a solid ‘back-iron’ support. This allows me to make quite large sculptures, although I am limited by the size of my kiln. The internal spaces of the sculptures are taken up with packaging materials – newspaper, cardboard or biodegradable bubble wrap – all of which are usually taken out before firing.

I also use a variety of slab-building techniques to hollow build my sculptures from the ‘ground’ up. I teach these methods in my workshops and masterclasses.

These working methods allow for free and spontaneous variations on a particular theme, each piece being subtly different from its predecessor.

I decorate my clay sculptures with a combination of engobes, oxides, and underglazes. Recently these have been getting a little bit more ‘splashy’ and expressive.