For Open Studios I will be showing my work alongside my Turquoise Arts co-directors, Mark Burgum and Fran Lily. Come along to find out more about Turquoise Arts and tell us what arts activities or programmes you’d like to see happening. We will be selling drinks, cards, paintings and pots with locally grown plants.

This year I will be showing work that I’ve been making in response to spending time back in my hometown, Southend-on-Sea. I’ve been splitting my time between the Calder Valley and Southend whilst helping to care for my mother. As an act of care to myself, I spent time reimmersing myself in the landscape that’s so familiar to me yet so different to our green valleys, and seeing what it might offer up to my practice. It offered so much: I found clay on my local beach, beautiful pebbles, new landscapes on the estuary mudflats created by the tidal flows, plants to use in glazes. My aim is to make a series of ceramic vessels entirely made from the shoreline. I went back to analog photography and learned how to make alternative photographic prints from the materials I was collecting, including phytograms. Landscape, materials and process.

I’ll also be selling ceramic work that I produce in my home studio in Luddendenfoot, including fermenting crocks, plant pots and other vessels made from local (Calder Valley) clay, and some work from the Ancient Underlands exhibitions (https://turquoisearts.org/projects/).

I will be displaying recent phytograms in the Hebden Bridge Town Hall exhibition this year, and will have some work on display in the window of the Old Gate pub during the Window Trail.

I will also be showing a different collection of work inspired by summertime at Brier Hey Pottery in Mytholmroyd.