Tension between wonder and threat is the common thread within my practice. Wilderness looms large in my current research. A sense of an unknowable world that has, throughout time, given rise not only to great cunning, but also to human supposition which is charming in its outrageous dislocation from what we now know to be the facts. A depletion of wilderness, both in our landscape and in this shrinking thicket of what we do not know, may have serious consequences for the imagination.

“Now there is much that the eel can tell us about curiosity – rather more indeed than curiosity can inform us of the eel” *

A disgusting animal that has fed humanity across cultures and throughout history. An elusive creature, its barely credible life-cycle has begged much guess-work and much guile has been employed in its capture. I explored this in porcelain, involving other materials where they were right.

* Swift, Graham, Waterland, London: Picador 1984 p.170