A researcher and artist exploring the haptic potential for using clay to explore place from tactile perspectives that recognise and respond to environmental and climate issues.
My work is based on the potential for clay to be used to explore place from a haptic perspective. This mode of thinking is predicated on the importance of the sense of touch and highlights a growing cultural and philosophical concern regarding digital alienation. Employing tactile interaction fosters an embodied, subjective connection to our surroundings -- one that is increasingly important for recognising and responding to environmental and climate issues.
I am an artist researcher. As senior lecturer at The University of Worcester, on a research contract (from 1992 -2024) I taught on the BA Fine Art programme, ran the MA in Creative Media, gave talks and exhibited widely. Examples of this include being invited to speak at the International Ceramics Festival symposium (Aberystwyth University, 2017) to discuss the potential for clay in the exploration of space, regarding the interplay between touching and the touched. And, functioning outside the field of ceramics, (in 2018), I exhibited in two exhibitions at the International Print Exhibition & Conference in Santander, Spain, where I was invited to show in the ‘Other Disciplines’ category to highlight these ideas in relation to print. My ongoing membership of Space Place Practice, a multi-disciplinary research group, has allowed me to develop my research into ceramics and the haptic, alongside an involvement in contemporary fine-art discourse and theoretical enquiry. I have also published and exhibited with Space Place Practice both nationally and internationally and was selected to exhibit at ‘Loss & Lucidity’, Lisbon, Portugal, 2019.
The haptic -- and what is perceived through the sense of touch -- is instrumental to how we experience ceramics and perhaps, as the oldest and the most distinctively pre-verbal of all the senses, how we understand experience itself. A sense of this, its significance and its mystery, led me to undertake my PhD at Bath Spa University (completed in October 2016) entitled: 'Ceramics and the haptic; a case study sited in Worcester Cathedral'. Very quickly, my research uncovered a problem: we do not seem to have the words to adequately talk about touch. Though we use metaphors of touch to capture and signify what we ‘feel’, information about our tactile realities often gets lost when verbalised. This I describe as the paradox of the haptic. As a ceramist, I try to bring the results of my experiential contact with clay and with the world around me into being. In this way, my ceramic pieces become touch-made-visual, pieces of embodied reality, translating them into a mode where they can be readily talked about.
In collaboration with Maureen Gamble, I am currently involved in a deep mapping project of Malvern’s Holy Well. The findings from our experiential research have directly highlighted environmental concerns, as over the period of the project we have noticed that there is a marked difference in the sound of the water gushing from the well, and there is now a notice advising the public not to drink the water without boiling it.