Every Contact Leaves a Trace:

The core of my work, the area to which I keep returning, is how to express the materiality, volume and messy physicality of landscape, with which clay is so affiliated and entwined, whilst still retaining the transience captured by a photographic image. My work traces the dichotomy of repulsion, fragility and beauty common in a real worked landscape, the sense that below a veneer of order, domestication and history, the natural world in all its chaos and beauty is waiting to take over.

Shown at the Royal Academy Summer Show 2024.

Porcelain and stoneware monoprint, with relief print, sgraffito etching, oak gall ink and smoke.

‘Archive’ is a response to the story of my Great-great grandparents, Joseph Noble and Ann Laybourn who signed their name with a cross. These small marks, made in their marriage certificate in 1872, are the only tangible trace left of their lives.

My work seeks to illuminate these other histories; unacknowledged, marginal stories that rarely feature in official archives, but can be glimpsed in the material of landscape. In footpaths and obsolete buildings, scratch dials, strip lynchets and the scatter of plants. Trace memories and fleeting stories held within the earth that state that here, in this place, stood people whose existence might otherwise remain without physical trace.