"I grew up in Sheffield in the 1980s, a place that felt to me to be reaching for modernity. Ambitious brutalist architecture sat alongside the rapid decline of the steel industry, challenging the city’s identity. I immersed myself in this landscape of concrete optimism and heavy industrial decay. It has given me a lasting romantic attachment to a sense of possibility and search for progress set in a context of machinery and processes that were starting to become part of the past.

Years later as I started my ceramics practice, I wanted to recreate and memorialise some of those feelings I had as a teenager through small forms which could be held and brought into the home. I am trying to make miniature monuments to the industrial and the architectural.

I often start with traditional, functional pottery forms and augment or distort them to hint at some future, progressive utility while combining these with materials, shapes and surfaces which suggest rusting machinery or abandoned factories.

Ultimately, I am trying to recreate the sense of wonder and awe I felt as a child looking at the details of an urban landscape dominated by structures I didn’t really understand. But they felt to me to be deeply connected to a hope for the future driven by technological progress."