I first met clay on a course I joined almost for fun. I had no ambition to become a ceramic artist and no plan for where it might lead. But as my hands entered the clay, something unexpected happened. I lost all sense of time. For once, my mind was not leading. My hands were showing me the way.
 

In the quiet concentration of shaping the material, something in my nervous system settled. The constant movement of my ADHD grew still. The intense sensitivity of rejection-sensitive dysphoria softened, and PTSD began to release its grip.

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I was not trying to calm myself, I was simply present.​ To understand why this became so significant, I have to begin with the life that came before it.

A Life Built Around Performance
For most of my professional life, I worked with strategy, digital transformation, leadership and quality. I led large programmes, built international teams and learned to create direction in complex organisations.

Outside work, I was driven by the same force. I competed in triathlon and ultra-distance cycling, crossing countries and continents under my own power. I knew how to set an ambitious goal and keep going long after my body had begun asking me to stop. Performance had become more than something I did well. It was a way of understanding myself and, in many ways, a way of surviving.

Strength gave me a place in the world.
Control made that world feel safer.

In 2024, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. It did not give me a simple lesson or turn me into someone new. But it made it harder to ignore what my body had been telling me for a long time: the speed and pressure I had come to regard as normal were no longer sustainable.

In 2025, I left my professional life in technology. I had no carefully constructed plan for what would replace it. I needed room for something I could not manage or measure. Clay became my safe haven.

Beginning Again
Clay asks for attention rather than speed. It refuses complete control. It remembers pressure. It sags, cracks and changes in the fire. An often it becomes something I did not plan.

Clay has brought me back to my body. It has also taught me to stay, without deciding whether it has succeeded or failed. Some pieces need more time. Others to be reclaimed so I can begin again.

I am a self-taught. I build every piece by hand, moving between functional ceramics and sculptural objects. Some begin with an idea; others emerge through the conversation between my hands and the material. In my work, I explore trauma, vulnerability, belonging and transformation and the traces life leaves in both body and material. Some stories are visible. Others remain quietly held within the form.

The Beauty of Change
Japanese ceramics, Buddhist philosophy and wabi-sabi have deeply influenced the way I work. A crooked edge, a mark left by my hand or a surface altered by fire holds its own kind of beauty and carries evidence of touch, time and change.

Today, my life moves between clay, movement and meditation. Leadership, meditation, yoga and ceramics may appear to belong to different worlds, but each has taught me to listen and to make room for something new to emerge.

I am still a beginner. Not because I wish to make myself smaller, but because I want to remain open to what I do not yet know.