“My journey into working with clay started at the house and studio of my grandfather. I grew up surrounded by his work and this provided an environment that was especially formative. His studio was an aggregation of a lifetime of work; sacks of long-discontinued materials, notebooks of glaze recipes, throwing notes and sketches going back to the 1950s. The walls and shelves were full of curiosities and ephemera, a cow’s skull, a shard of German saltware, a faded newspaper cut-out of a ballerina next to one of the patterned flank of a whale shark. After my grandfather died, I moved there to work in his studio, and learned to make my own ceramics.”