Work of Body

An ongoing exploration of the relationship between clay and the body.

January 2025, my socials algorithm populates my feed with adverts for weight loss injections and twelve week courses in wall Pilates, which I’m assured will help me lose two dress sizes by Easter.

I feel a little as though I’ve stepped into a secret society. A club I didn’t want to join, full of people like me but who I desperately don’t want to be like.

My menopause is swaddled in a semi permeable membrane; one which is controlled wholly (and sometimes irrationally) by me. Permission to discuss is granted on an ad hoc basis at my self-indulgent behest. For context, I am 53. During 2020, masked by ‘unprecedented times’, changes occurred. Subtle weight gain. Easily explained by eight hours a day at a computer and a bag of orange Smartie buttons every day for three months. Aches and pains, stiff joints. Again, life was different, predominantly static and contained within four walls.

So now I find myself inhabiting an alien form. My body; diligently cared for over five decades. Fed, watered, exercised, medicated and moisturised now confronts me in the mirror, unrecognisable and refusing to acknowledge the gratitude I am owed. I wake each day inside a stiff immobile beast where previously, not very long ago, there was an elastic and manageable form which was content to do the bidding of its owner.

Work of body is an exploration which meets these perfectly normal, yet disturbing symptoms of hormonal and physical mid-life change head on. I use the malleability of clay and its inherent fleshiness to explore a rapidly changing body. Throwing vessels on the potter’s wheel – a process coded as historically male - which, whilst wet, I allow to take on the shape of my body. Mapping my form this way allows me to identify my shifting edges and better understand the place I take up in the world.