Scratched - 2026

2026 marked my fiftieth year of working in clay.

My 2026 exhibition Scratched at Weswal Gallery, Tamworth, NSW, brought together a new body of work featuring my continued exploration and evolution of sgraffito designs. This work shifts toward more expansive surfaces—vases, platters, lamps and wall pieces—where thrown and slab-built forms act as canvases for carved slip and colour. Through sgraffito, I explore a visual language of abstracted imagery: marks, signals, fragments of mapping, and playful communications that sit somewhere between intention and instinct. The surfaces are built through drawing and removal as much as through making—scratching back into the clay to reveal layers, gestures, and rhythms. The results are bright, graphic and often energetic, but not fixed in meaning. Rather than describing a single idea, the work is open-ended. It invites interpretation—both in the making and in the viewing. What emerges is less a narrative than a field of possibilities.

This body of work builds on a long engagement with functional ceramics while moving further into pieces in which surface, image and form carry equal weight.