From performance to Presence,
Embracing Impermanence
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 and place. 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 the vigilance held in my body by PTSD began to release its grip.
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 moved through complex organisations where decisions carried both financial and human consequences.
I knew how to create direction in uncertainty. I knew how to take responsibility, hold complexity and keep moving when the pressure increased.
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, endure discomfort and continue long after my body had begun asking me to stop.
Performance was not simply something I did well. It had become a way of understanding myself — and, in many ways, a way of surviving. As long as I was moving, achieving, solving and carrying responsibility, I did not have to feel everything that lived beneath the surface. Strength gave me a place in the world. Control made that world feel safer. But there is always a cost when the body is asked to carry what the mind has learned to outrun.
In 2024, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Cancer did not suddenly turn me into another person, nor did it arrive with a simple lesson or a neatly defined new beginning. But it made it impossible to continue ignoring what my body and nervous system had known for a long time. The speed, pressure and responsibility I had learned to regard as normal were no longer sustainable.
In 2025, I left my professional life in technology. I did not leave with a carefully constructed plan for what should replace it. There was no new strategy, no roadmap and no clearly defined destination. I left to create room for something quieter and more honest. Something that could not be managed, measured or forced into existence. And in that opening, I found clay.
BEGINNING AGAIN
Working with clay returned me to my hands and my body. Clay asks for attention rather than speed. It responds to touch, but it refuses complete control. It remembers pressure. It sags, cracks, collapses and changes in the fire. Sometimes it becomes what I imagined. At other times, it becomes something I could never have planned.
My journey into ceramics has therefore also become a meeting with imperfection — and with my own ability to remain present when something does not turn out as expected.
This does not mean that everything must be preserved simply because it has been made. Some objects carry an energy or tension that continues to disturb my nervous system. Part of my practice is learning to recognise when a piece needs more time, when it needs to change and when it should not be given a life beyond the studio. Acceptance is not the same as passivity. Sometimes care means allowing an object to exist as it is. At other times, it means reclaiming the clay and beginning again.
I am a self-taught ceramic artist. I do not use a wheel or moulds. Every piece is built slowly by hand and allowed to develop its own form, surface and character.
Some pieces begin with an idea. Others emerge through the conversation between my hands and the material. I am drawn to the moment when control loosens and the work begins to reveal a life of its own.
My practice moves between functional ceramics and sculptural objects. I work with themes such as trauma, vulnerability, belonging and transformation — and with the traces that life leaves in both body and material.
Some stories are visible.
Others remain quietly held within the form.
THE BEAUTY OF WHAT CHANGES
My work is deeply influenced by Japanese ceramics, Buddhist philosophy and wabi-sabi — not merely as an aesthetic, but as a way of meeting life.
Buddhism teaches us that everything is impermanent. Wabi-sabi invites us to recognise the beauty within that truth.
A crooked edge, a scar in the surface, ash deposited by the kiln or a form altered by fire is not necessarily a flaw. It is evidence of touch, time and transformation.
Nothing is perfect.
Nothing lasts.
Nothing is ever entirely finished.
Today, my life moves between clay, movement and meditation. I am also a trauma-informed yoga teacher, and although leadership, yoga and ceramics may appear to belong to different worlds, I experience them as expressions of the same practice.
Each asks me to listen.
Each asks me to stay present with what is here, without immediately trying to correct, control or resolve it.
And each creates a space in which something new can emerge.
My years as a leader have not disappeared. They live in the way I hold space, recognise patterns and create conditions in which people and ideas can develop. But where I once believed that direction came primarily from knowing the answer, I am now more interested in what becomes possible when we dare to remain with the unanswered. I am still a beginner.
Not because I wish to make myself smaller, but because I want to remain open. To be a beginner is to enter what I do not yet know without demanding certainty. It is to trust that understanding can grow through attention, curiosity and practice.
My work is an invitation to pause and come closer. To notice the marks left by hands, life and fire. To recognise that what has been changed is not necessarily broken — and that what is imperfect may still carry beauty, dignity and meaning.
Sometimes the most meaningful form only appears when we stop insisting that we already know what it should become.