Vases and Glaze Development

Separate from the Prelude to Memory installation, a parallel body of work has developed through vase-making. It is here that the crackle glaze used across the sculptural practice has been developed and refined, each piece worked by hand rather than industrially reproduced.

The vase as a form carries its own long history, one shaped by the movement of glazes and techniques across cultures and colonial trade routes, and by the object’s later life as a marker of taste under mass production. This history sits behind the work as a point of research and reflection rather than something the vases set out to illustrate. Hand-making each one, with its own small variations in glaze and form, is simply how the practice has chosen to work.

The vessels stand apart from the wider degree show, as their own strand of the ceramic practice, though the glaze they’ve helped shape carries through into the ancestral figures on display.