About

 

MY JOURNEY

Welcome to Comfort & Calm and let's face it everyone needs a bit of Comfort and Calm in their life, pun intended!

          

Hello I'm Jac the face behind the name, and the hands and heart behind the ceramic pieces you see here. My journey with ceramics began a number of years back when I joined a pottery workshop in the hope that I could instil a sense of calm in what was a busy life! I instantly fell in love with the whole process of creating ceramics. There is something immensely soothing and mindful about mud manipulation and something incredibly exciting about opening a kiln door, to discover the treasures that lie behind it. 

 

MY INSPIRATION

My ceramic work is inspired by nature and natural surrounds with a strong emphasis upon woodland inspirations. I feel like I am a real woodland spirit by heart, perhaps because growing up my family didn't have a car until I was much older and so we walked a lot! And thank goodness for that! My favourite walks were always the woodland paths, there is something powerfully calm within those walls of bark! Interesting enough the town that I lived near when I was a child was called Leigh and its name is derived from the old English word: "Leah", which meant a place at the wood or woodland. My connection to the woods was obviously meant to be! 

 My ceramic pieces are predominately textured using a variety of organic matter, such as tree bark, seed pods, leaves, pine-cones and gum nuts among others, that are foraged from my garden, or from walking in various natural environments. I work mainly in stoneware which is manipulated using a variety of traditional techniques: pinching, coiling and slab rolling. The slow process of hand building allows me to focus on subtle detail and give time to each piece. Ceramics are carefully hand painted with earthy glazes. Each piece is named after various places, that have special meaning to me. 

My work is intended to instill a sense of calm and to evoke a feeling of being in a place close to nature's heart. 

I hope that you enjoy looking around and if you should decide to take home a piece of Comfort and Calm today, then I hope that you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed creating it!

Warmest Jac