These sculptures emerged from a fractured relationship with myself. Growing up with a mother whose illness and alcoholism shaped our home, I absorbed patterns of disconnection that ran deeper than I could see — the kind passed through generations before finding their way into me. For a long time, I didn’t know who I was. I couldn’t stand who I was.

When I began working in clay, forms started appearing that I didn’t fully recognise. Irregular, biomorphic, somewhere between figure and object. I called them creatures — because that’s what they felt like: something other, something I needed to hold at arm’s length. I struggled to like my own work. There was real anger in that, and real grief.

The shift came slowly, then all at once. Through a process of deep therapeutic work, I began to reconcile with the parts of myself I had spent years rejecting. What had felt alien started to feel familiar. What felt fractured started to feel like mine.

The more recent works carry that change. The forms soften. They hold space rather than resist it. I’ve stopped calling them creatures — now I call them “particules”: fragments of something continuous, drops of the self coming together. Not fixed. Not resolved. But recognisably, undeniably me.

Working in clay keeps me honest. Each piece is shaped through touch, pressure, and repetition — the same way understanding is built. Slowly. Through return.

What was once approached as something other is now recognised as something held.