I've Been Quietly Waiting For Myself

I'VE BEEN QUIETLY WAITING FOR MYSELF

This vessel became a turning point in my practice. It was one of the first forms I made that felt resolved to me, but more importantly, it was where I began to recognise a visual and written language that felt like my own.

“I’ve been quietly waiting for myself” describes a feeling of existing somewhere between who I had been, who illness had required me to become, and a self that I was still trying to reach. It is not necessarily about waiting to recover or return to a previous version of myself. The person I was waiting for did not yet exist. She had to be made.

On the reverse, “How do I keep going?” complicates the apparent certainty of the front. Finding myself does not resolve the difficulty of continuing. Both statements can be true at once: I can recognise myself more clearly while still having no idea how I am going to carry on.

The surface brings together elements that would become recurring parts of my ceramic language: handwritten text, transfer pattern, brickwork, drips, uneven edges and visible layers of making. The brick motif can suggest construction, protection and obstruction simultaneously, while the more traditional blue pattern beneath it is partially covered and interrupted rather than erased.

Looking back, the title also describes what was happening through the process of making it. I had been searching for a way of working that felt recognisably mine, and somewhere in this vessel I began to find it. The work became both a record of waiting for myself and evidence that I had started to arrive.