Current Work
Inspiration
I have always been drawn to making, nature, and health and wellbeing. My past roles include chef, chocolatier, and nutrition scientist, all of which enabled me to engage with these essential interests. Today, I continue on the same path in a different creative medium; as a ceramicist, I strive to instill wellbeing through sensorily evoking the natural world.
Roots and resin
I look to nature, particularly landscapes, patterns, movements, colours, and other forms of life, for inspiration. As human beings, our interdependency with nature is paramount to the health of our natural environment, and to our own. Physically and mentally, we prosper in nature.
Branching out
I am expanding my practice to consider the concept of identity and its evolution. The impressionable and preservable nature of clay provides a fitting medium to emulate the metamorphic nature of the self. Over the course of a lifetime, internal and external pressures coincide to impress shape and character on ourselves, yielding a fluid identity; a metamorphosis. These pressures stem from the past, from our heritage and the legacy of lineage; from the present, in physiological changes, ideological deliberations, and social expectations; and from the future, in our commitment to future generations.
Transplantation
From personal experience, two processes stand out as key shapers of identity. Transplantation, resulting from geographical migration and foreign cultural immersion, yields a hybrid self of old and new. It begs the question of how much old, and how much new? Such transplantation is a familiar occurrence, and my attempts to ‘optimise’ the old-new hybrid are a constant presence since my childhood.
These processes express themselves physically, from feeling the altered climate on my skin, to hearing the new sounds of foreign languages, to tasting new flavours and ingredients; as well as internally, from absorbing new social norms to navigating what pieces of my cultural, ritualistic and familial heritage to bring forward on my journey.
Matrescence
Matrescence (the process of becoming a mother) has made an acute impact on my identity. Psychological changes are by far the most pronounced: my sense of strength and vulnerability reach equally astronomical new heights; overnight, I have gained a sixth sense of maternal instinct.
There are complementary physiological changes, that are many and lasting: from changed nails, hair and skin, to structural brain changes, to a different body shape that still feels ‘not me’. While many of these are a frustration consistently hanging overhead, they are dwarfed by my gained maternal force. Being a mother in the present makes me believe I have always been one, including in the past, before my children were conceived. This is an irreversible metamorphosis.