I think that my need to work creatively stems from when my mother put me in an orphanage when I was a few months old, and left me there for eight years. This caused me to feel quite alone and frightened, and I have been looking  for a sense of belonging, a way to make sense of life ever since. I find that sense of belonging deep inside me when I connect to my creativity. Working with clay is a way for me to explore and express deep feelings of disquiet, pain, exuberance, joy.. .It is, in fact a form of therapy. I find that while making my torsos, for instance, I connect with a world inside me where humans are part of nature, where I feel how everything is alive and everything is connected. These feelings have lead me to explore Shamanism and it is almost as if the two practices, sculpting and Shamanism, are two aspects of the same thing for me.

I sometimes hear people say that they ‘haven’t an artistic bone in their body’ and I can’t help feeling both sad and a little bit upset.  I believe that art and artistic expression is our birth right; everyone is born creative, curious, expressive and full of  joy and exuberance. Most of that is ‘educated’ out of us at an early age. We are taught that for art to be considered ‘good’  it must be expensive and forbidding, the artist should preferably be dead, and his/her work hung behind bars in a museum.
I am delighted to find that most people who come to my ceramic workshops produce expressive, individual and beautiful work and that they have a fantastic time doing so. During one of my first classes a lady psychiatrist in her fifties suddenly exclaimed that she hadn’t had this much fun since she was a child!
And this is exactly what I want to deliver; a space for you to rediscover just how much fun it is to create something with your own hands!