‘Mother Plant’  began life as an everyday object, a small cutting from my late mother’s spider plant that she had gifted me not long before her sudden passing. I turned to this simple object in a time of great anxiety and social unrest during a pandemic. With a need to connect to nature and others, the plant was used as a metaphor for branching out, growing bigger and making new connections by taking cuttings from the plant, making pots to re-home them and passing them on to a web of participants with an invitation to share cuttings back to me in the hope of making a larger web of connections.

I then returned to the potters wheel, something which I had briefly explored, to now create pots to house the plantlets from the “Mother Plant”. This meditative process of throwing and manipulating clay was therapeutic for both the time of uncertainty and also through a grieving period for my mother.

To deepen my practice within sustainable parameters, I chose to use a ’natural glaze’ to decorate the pots by using waste matter for colouration and also through the study of alternative firing techniques.

Returning back to a socially orientated practice, these were then distributed to participants and documented through social media and an interactive map. The relationship between myself as an artist, the artwork and the viewer become intertwined. The sharing of the plant, receiving photos back or participants adding to the interactive map becomes a collaboration that brings a flux and uncertainty, an unknown that gives the work autonomy of which I can’t predict the outcome between myself, viewer and whether the artwork will shift into something new.