Finding My Narrative: A Retrospective

My MA journey has been a steady source of growth throughout the last two years. Although officially listed as part time, it has felt anything but part time to me. My school art teacher, Miss Bradwell, always instilled in us that you only get out what you put in. It is a phrase that has stayed with me throughout my life, and it certainly shaped how I approached my master's degree. I threw myself into it, sometimes probably more than was entirely sensible, but the result is that I have gained an enormous amount from the experience.

When I started the MA, my ambitions were relatively straightforward. I wanted to move my practice away from functional ceramics and towards something more art based. I wanted to better understand glazing, develop my technical skills and, perhaps most importantly, discover a style and visual language that felt like mine.

Looking back now, I think I have progressed significantly in all of those areas, but I certainly would not consider myself a master. In fact, if anything, the MA has shown me just how much there is still to learn. The difference is that I now feel much better equipped to continue that learning. I no longer feel as though I am searching around in the dark hoping to stumble across something that works. I have a clearer understanding of my materials, my processes and the direction I want my practice to take.

The MA has not given me all the answers. It has, however, given me better questions.

There have been several moments throughout the last two years that stand out as genuine turning points. Moments where something shifted, clicked into place, or where I suddenly realised that my practice had moved into a different territory.

The first of these was undoubtedly finding my theme.

Arriving at Narratives in Clay was not immediate. It came quite late in my first year, but perhaps that was because it needed time to develop. I spent a considerable amount of time exploring ideas, trying to find something that both floated my boat and had sufficient academic substance to sustain a master's degree. More importantly, I needed something that I could genuinely connect with and continue developing beyond the MA.

The world of Victorian culture, storytelling, forgotten histories and my imagined decaying freakshow provided exactly that. It gave me a framework within which I could explore character, narrative, humour and social history. It also gave me permission to bring together the things that have always interested me: old objects, strange stories, unusual characters and a slightly darker sense of humour.

Finding that theme changed everything because it transformed my work from simply making ceramic objects into building a world.

Research has also changed significantly throughout the MA. It is not that I never researched before. I absolutely did. However, I now approach research in a much more focused and purposeful way. I am no longer simply gathering information because I feel I should. I am looking for connections, details and ideas that can feed directly back into my practice.

My investigations into Victorian life have taken me through books, museum collections, galleries, television programmes, online archives and countless articles. I have researched everything from Victorian mourning practices to travelling exhibitions, social customs and the objects that surrounded everyday life. The wonderful thing about having a subject that genuinely interests me is that research rarely feels like a chore.

If I had anything resembling a decent memory, I could probably become quite the dinner party bore with random facts about the Victorian period. Thankfully, I don't, so everyone is safe.

What has surprised me most is how much the research has influenced the making. The two are not separate activities. The more I understand the world I am referencing, the more authentic the characters and objects become. Research has become part of the creative process rather than simply something that happens before making begins.

One of the earliest practical breakthroughs came when I moved away from slab building. This was not an easy decision because I was comfortable with slabs. I understood them, I enjoyed working with them and I was good at designing around their limitations. However, my early experiments with origami-inspired characters highlighted a problem. Whilst technically successful, they were not achieving the aesthetic or emotional connection I was looking for. They felt like sculptures that existed independently rather than illustrations translated into clay.

The realisation that I needed to move towards a more sculptural approach was something of an epiphany. It opened up possibilities that had previously been unavailable to me. Suddenly my characters could have more presence, more personality and more interaction with the viewer. They were no longer simply images in three dimensions. They became objects with their own physicality.

This change also meant reconsidering my choice of clay body. I tested several different clays before settling on ES20. Finding the right clay was important because my work needs to balance several competing requirements. I need enough grog to provide stability during construction, particularly with larger sculptural forms, but I also need a smooth enough surface to allow the level of modelling and detail that is central to my aesthetic.

Working with ES20 has been a pleasure. It has a lovely consistency and feels responsive in my hands. That may sound like a strange thing to say about clay, but anyone who works with it will understand. Some materials seem to fight you, whereas others almost encourage you in a particular direction. ES20 feels suited to the way I build.

Choosing materials has therefore become much more than a technical decision. The material itself contributes to the final outcome and supports the visual language I am developing.

If moving into sculpture was my biggest creative breakthrough, glazing has probably been my biggest challenge.

Throughout the MA I have created what feels like an endless mountain of test tiles. In reality, most of them did not lead to a successful glaze. They mainly told me what I did not want. However, those failures were still valuable because they gradually narrowed the possibilities and increased my understanding of how different materials behave.

Developing the aged, worn aesthetic I wanted was particularly challenging. I needed surfaces that felt as though they belonged within my Victorian world: weathered, neglected and slightly mysterious. Achieving this involved experimenting with oxides, stains, underglazes and numerous combinations of washes.

For the dirty wash, I eventually found that an underglaze approach worked best for me. It gave me the control I needed and allowed me to build the depth and age I was looking for without overpowering the surface detail. It also sat well with any additional glazes required to seal a piece.

The matte glaze finish proved considerably more elusive. I needed solutions that worked at both high and low temperatures, which added another layer of complexity. Eventually, I found a recipe that I could adapt for stoneware and a commercial glaze that could be modified for lower firing.

Crackle glazes also featured heavily in my experimentation. Some were beautiful. Some were definitely not.

When it came to glazing, there were plenty of moments where I opened the kiln thinking I had finally discovered the answer, only to find that the kiln gods had other ideas. However, every unsuccessful firing contributed something. I became more confident at analysing why something had failed and what I could change next time. The process became less about searching for a perfect result and more about understanding the relationship between materials, process and outcome.

This reflects what Mäkelä and Aktaş (2022) describe as making being a form of thinking, where knowledge develops through an ongoing dialogue between the maker and the materials. Looking back, this perfectly describes my own experience throughout the MA. Many of my strongest ideas did not arrive fully formed before I began making. They emerged through handling clay, solving problems and responding to what was physically happening in front of me.

Continuing from this, perhaps the most significant breakthrough in my glazing journey was when I decided to completely abandon colour. This sounds like a strange decision when developing ceramic work, but for me it was incredibly freeing. I had spent a considerable amount of time trying to find the right colours and combinations, but something always felt slightly wrong. The colours were competing with the characters rather than supporting them.

Sacking off colour and moving towards a monochrome palette was one of those moments where a limitation actually created more possibilities. Removing colour allowed me to focus on form, texture, surface and atmosphere. Instead of asking what colour something should be, I could ask a much more interesting question: what does this character need the surface to communicate?

The decision also connected strongly with my Victorian influences. The aged, weathered and slightly decayed aesthetic I was drawn to did not require bright colour. In fact, colour often distracted from the qualities I was trying to achieve. The restriction gave me the freedom to develop a much clearer visual language.

This coincided with visiting Ceramic Art London, where I encountered a number of pieces using metallic glazes. These immediately caught my attention. They had the aged, industrial and slightly mysterious qualities that fitted naturally within my practice. I began experimenting with proprietary metallic glazes and developing my own recipes, and these finishes have since become an important part of my surface design.

However, the biggest conceptual breakthrough of the MA was not actually about glaze. It was realising that I had been approaching my narratives in the wrong way.

Initially, I was trying to get the stories onto the work. I experimented with ways of including text, information and explanations because I wanted viewers to understand the characters and their histories. Whilst there is still a place for supporting narratives, I eventually realised that the ceramics themselves needed to carry more of the storytelling. I needed to stop putting the narratives onto the pieces and start putting them into them.

This was a major shift in my thinking. By approaching the work in a more three-dimensional illustrative way, I found that the characters became much stronger. Their personalities could be communicated through posture, surface detail, gesture and construction choices rather than relying on written explanation.

The mark making became particularly important. Textures were no longer simply decorative decisions. They became part of the character development. The hammered surface of Scrawny, Deaders' metallic details and Lady Delores' textures all contribute to who they are. The surface tells part of the story.

This is probably one of the areas where I have grown the most as a maker. Earlier in my practice, I often thought about decoration as something applied at the end. Now, surface is considered from the very beginning because it is integral to the meaning of the piece.

Another unexpected discovery during the MA was that I work best at home.

This was not something I had necessarily anticipated. As a student, there is an expectation that the university environment is where the most important work happens. However, approaching the Ceramic Wales deadline changed my working patterns significantly. The two-and-a-half-hour commute to campus became time that I realised could be spent in my own studio.

The decision to stay home was initially practical, but it became transformative.

Working ten to twelve-hour days in my own space allowed me to become completely immersed in the practice. I was surrounded by my own inspiration, could go off at tangents without interruption, leave work in progress around me and follow ideas at any time they saw fit to appear.

The result was significant. My design development accelerated, my build times improved and, perhaps most importantly, I became more confident in trusting my own decisions.

There is a certain irony that after two years of travelling to university to develop my practice, I discovered that the best place for me to continue developing it is exactly where I had started: my own studio at home.

Fortunately, this fits rather nicely with my plans for the future because that is where I intend to spend the rest of my ceramics career.

Reflecting on the MA as a whole, the greatest transformation has not simply been technical. Of course, my understanding of clay, construction and glazing has developed enormously, but the more significant change has been in how I view myself as a practitioner.

Before starting the course, I questioned whether I was really an artist. I had skills, ideas and enthusiasm, but there was always that lingering voice questioning whether I belonged in that category. Imposter syndrome is not something that disappears simply because you complete a qualification. I suspect it will always appear occasionally, particularly when I am standing beside my work trying to convince someone that they should buy it. However, I now have a much stronger sense of confidence in my practice.

The MA has challenged me creatively, technically and personally. It has pushed me beyond the comfortable approaches I had previously relied upon and forced me to experiment, question and adapt. This is something that I do not think I would have achieved working entirely alone.

Left to our own devices, many of us naturally return to what we know. It is only when we are pushed outside those comfortable boundaries that genuine development happens. That has certainly been true for me.

The University of Central Lancashire has given me the opportunity to grow not only as a ceramic maker, but as a reflective practitioner. I now understand my decisions more clearly, can articulate why I make the choices I do and have developed a practice that feels authentic rather than simply technically competent.

Two years ago, I wanted to become better at ceramics. I leave the MA with far more than that. I have discovered my subject, developed my visual language, built confidence in my abilities and created a body of work that feels genuinely connected to who I am as a maker.

Most importantly, I can now say without hesitation, even if it does feel somewhat strange, that I am a ceramic artist.

References:

Mäkelä, M. and Aktaş, B.M. (2022) ‘In dialogue with the environment: The environment, creativity, materials and making’, Craft Research, 13(1), pp. 9–34. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1386/crre_00064_1 (Accessed: 6 August 2026).