The ‘Vent’ series

Vent is a growing series of unique perforated stoneware vessels begun in 2018.

Each piece is hand-built using a custom clay body heavily saturated with stone and mineral inclusions, and organic material.

At some deeply distant, almost mythical, moment in the history of our planet scientists tell us that the mineral conditions were ideal for those very earliest of precursors to spawn life: The signs are, that from mineral clay; from chemistry, biology was born, and some suggest that this happened at the site of a hydro-thermal vent amongst the blackness of the ocean floor.

The pocked, eroded bodies of these almost muscular vessels suggest geological, even biological, forces are at play and the concoction of glazes and oxides cling as if lichen or barnacles have encrusted.

Fired multiple times to over 1280 centigrade the clay and glazes merge to reveal a pumice-like structure; light-weight and foamed, fizzing almost.