In Past Pleasures, I explore the evocative possibilities of the ceramic bottle as both subject and symbol. The Bottle is a vessel designed to contain, preserve, and serve this lends it to be deeply metaphorical. They speak of memory of the domestic and the body. I return to this form repeatedly, not just in clay but across painting, drawing, and print-like processes, to investigate the layers of meaning that can be embedded in and evoked through repetition, surface, and form.

My ceramic work in this series leans into bold surfaces: textured, layered, and is sometimes unpredictable. Combining slips, oxides and glazes with gestural applications, encapsulated energy and residue. The traces of making, traces of touch are my primarily motive. I’m interested in how the surface of a bottle might echo the patina of age, or reflect the marks of a lived experience. These vessels are not pristine; they are animated by the processes that made them.

The paintings, too, are built through layering down an image over a texture, scraping back, resisting, covering. There’s a sense of excavation in the way I work, like revealing something once lost. Bottles appear in silhouette or as impressions, sometimes fragmentary, emerging from complex backgrounds. At times I use stencils or printing plates made from bottle forms, allowing them to ghost across the canvas. These painted works speak to memory and presence: what is remembered, what fades, and what unexpectedly returns.

There is a conversation between painting and ceramics in this body of work that I find deeply satisfying. The surfaces of the paintings mimic ceramic texture; the ceramics reference painterly gestures. Each discipline informs the other. Clay has taught me patience and responsiveness; painting allows me to take risks and break apart form. The crossover is especially evident in the circular ceramic wall pieces, where I treat the surface almost like canvas, allowing colour and mark-making to become expressive rather than purely decorative.

By integrating ceramics and painting, I’m pushing at the boundaries of what each medium can say and how they can speak together. The result is a kind of material dialogue between clay and canvas, between containment and openness, between past pleasures and present practice.

This work is both personal and shared. It honours the tactile pleasures of making, the comfort of familiar forms, and the layered history of craft and domesticity. Through bottles, I find a way to hold and release ideas, memories, pleasures past.