It’s all very well to make drawings and plan things out but sometimes a piece just doesn’t go the way I thought it would, and that’s fine.

I used to get into a real tussle about this - surely if I’ve imagined a thing then it should appear pretty much LIKE THAT. It turns out, that doesn’t happen so much for me.

It’s harder to change your mind with clay - you have to pick your moment, and that moment is not when it’s been fired! I’ve learned to stand back from a piece for quite some time and let it ‘settle’ for a week in my mind, before I decide I’ll fire it. I may have to wrap it up in bin liners and spray it down from time to time, but the action of going back to it, having another look, walking around it, weighing it in the hand (if it’s not enormous) and the mind is an essential stage for me. It’s a slow steady approach, and that is very much how I work.

When I began this particular huge project I was definite it would be a pod like form, a huge wheat seed with a big wheatgerm inside it was what I imagined. But as the thing grew and grew I realised it wasn’t going to work. It felt dead, heavy and lifeless - the very thing I was trying NOT to portray.

I stood and looked at this gigantic double skinned bowl I’d created and waited for it to tell me what it wanted to be (I know…bear with me). What does this shape bring to mind, I pondered, as I drank a mug of tea and ate an oaty ginger biscuit. Should I carry on or do we have 8 weeks of work about to go into the reclaim bins?

It was the middle of winter, the darkest part of the year. I thought of my woodburning stove and how the flames bring a smile to my face each time I light it, I thought about our outdoor brazier and a splendid Bonfire Night we’d had sat around it, drinking mulled wine and eating baked potatoes - the first real get together we’d had with friends in the past two years. Then I knew this piece wanted to be afire. This boring bowl could be a representation of a fire pit in clay and planting (I had decided by now it was definitely a garden item). Planted up with red and orange - crocosmia, red sage and marigolds perhaps - it would be a fire of clay and flowers.

I made flames and gave them some texture by scratching an old dining form across the shape, then added colour using metallic washes: