Chapter one of my story. The road from ink and stencils and acrylic pours all the way to the colourful, layered glaze work that became mine.
People often find me through the luster, the iridescent, rainbow-shifting surfaces I make now. But that work didn't come out of nowhere. The more I look back, the more I can see the same instinct surfacing again and again, something that comes from my soul and keeps emerging in different forms through different materials. A way of working I'm only really recognising now, for what it has been all along.
So before I take you into the luster, I want to start at the very beginning. This is how I got here.
A colour I carry from a place I don't remember
I was born in South Africa and we left when I was four, so I don't actually remember living there. But I've always had this feeling that so much of my colour comes from those early years. I'm drawn, deeply, to warm earthy colours, to woven baskets, to layering colourful textiles all through my house, to bright colour everywhere. I can't prove it came from there… but I feel it. The body seems to remember what the mind can't.
A childhood that made room for mess
New Zealand I remember well, and it was where the creativity really took hold. We were always doing something, making something, growing something. My mum was extraordinarily enabling of all our creative tendencies. She sewed all our clothes. We grew our own food in the garden. She taught me to sew. There was always a project going.
I even remember playing with clay in our driveway, because my mum was taking pottery classes at the time. I would have been seven, maybe eight. I didn't think about that memory for years. But I love how it adds to the story. We also worked with clay in my high school art room, and of course art was my favourite subject at school. So, clay wasn't something I discovered in my thirties. It was something I came back to.
By the time I was a teenager, that creative streak had become who I was. I sewed my own clothes. I layered interesting textiles into shop-bought pieces, or just made things from scratch, and I flat-out refused to wear anything someone else was wearing. I was forever in the middle of some project, candle making, paper making, endless baking and cooking. My mum allowed and encouraged every bit of it, mess and all. That permission to make, and to make a mess doing it, is something I've carried my whole life.
What my mum passed down without trying
My mum is an artist too. She has done so many things over the years, but apparently she was always drawn to pottery. She told me she'd start a pottery class right before they moved countries, again and again, and never got to stick with it. She is an incredible painter now, oils and oil pastels, picturesque scenes from her many travels, doorways and stairways and flowers. She draws and keeps journals everywhere she goes. I have her paintings and drawings on my walls all over my house.
And then she got into acrylic pouring, and got me into it pretty hardcore too. Right around the time I started clay, I was deep into acrylic pouring, so deep that I was teaching it, running workshops, working with people one on one in my studio. That runs deeper than it sounds, because acrylic pouring is woven straight into how I glaze. The pouring, the swirling, the way colours mix and move and find their own cells and bubbles… I carried all of that into glaze. For a long time I was chasing surfaces that mimicked an acrylic pour. It had a huge impact on me.
My mum's influence has been quiet, but also huge at the same time. The very thing she couldn't quite hold onto, the pottery she kept having to leave behind, somehow landed in my hands and stayed.
Me and Mum in the studio
The instinct underneath everything: layering
Here is the thread I can see now, looking back. Almost every medium I have ever worked in has carried the same instinct, just expressed in a new material.
In my university years in Sydney I was studying Visual Communications, deep in photography, developing and printing film in the darkroom. Even then I'd draw on acetate and print graphics and layer them over the film. Around the same time I got heavily into stencils, street-art-style stenciling, paint layered through cut stencils. I loved documenting that kind of transient art, knowing it wouldn't be there forever. When I travelled around South America for four months on a summer break, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, I photographed street art everywhere I went. It's funny that I've ended up in such a permanent art form now, when I started in one that was made to disappear. But even then, it was the same instinct. Stencils and paint, layer on layer.
Then came New York, where I worked as a motion graphics artist. Even there, in completely computer-based work, I was always pulling in handmade elements, always drawn to the texture of something made by hand. When I stopped, I knew exactly what I wanted, to get back to purely hand-generated art. A counter to the screen. I never wanted to sit at a computer all day again, and I never have.
When I trace it forward, the line is so clear: sewing and textiles, darkroom layering, stencils and paint, then ink, then encaustic wax, then acrylic pours, then glaze. The same layered instinct, just in a different material every time.
The ink years, and the gap where the magic happens
The bigger arc was graphics, then painting, then ceramics… and each turn happened to arrive with a new home, a new studio, and a new baby.
When we moved from New York to Amsterdam I had a one-year-old, and I'd mostly stopped working. We had this beautiful two-storey apartment overlooking a park, with a big space downstairs we used as a studio. I started painting big, large-scale ink canvases there, sometimes one piece a couple of metres wide, sometimes a few canvases joined into a triptych. I'd splash water onto the canvas and drip ink into it, these watercolory, inky, splashed pieces, looking out over the park.
And what I loved most about those days was something I didn't have words for yet. There was a moment between when I dropped the ink onto the water and when the ink finished running and bleeding and transforming into whatever it was going to become. That gap. That little stretch of not-knowing is like a collaboration with the universe. You set it up, you bring everything you've learned, and then you let go and watch what happens. It's exactly the same feeling I get with a glaze in the kiln, and the same letting-go I found in acrylic pouring. You hone your skills for years, and then you always leave a little of it up to chance, up to that collaboration. For me that gap isn't the scary part. It's the most exciting.
Then we moved to LA in 2013, and I started working with encaustics, beeswax and resin layered over hot glue and ink, more textural and built-up. Sometimes I'd work on glass and put a light behind it, so the layers glowed from within. I have always loved to explore different mediums.
How clay slowly took over
It wasn't until we bought our own house in Pasadena, with a proper garage and backyard studio, that clay really arrived. My first class, at the start of 2015, honestly didn't go anywhere, I was pregnant and not feeling great, and I didn't make much I liked. Then we spent eight months in Australia, and when we came home with baby number three I started a new ceramics class in 2016. That's when I fell in love with clay. By then my husband and I had our three kids, and the studio had to find its place in the middle of a full, busy family life. My studio was set up for painting, but slowly the paintings got pushed to the side, and clay became the centre of everything.
Looking back, I'm so glad I wasn't focused on glaze in those first few years. I was learning clay itself, all its properties, its stages, its quirks, hand building, the way it moves and dries and behaves at each point. I needed that time with just the clay. You can't skip it. By the time I got my own kiln and my first glazes, I knew clay well enough to build solid, considered forms, real canvases that could hold everything I wanted to do with glaze. I was building the foundation for the glaze that was still to come. No cutting corners. The glaze only works because the clay underneath it was understood first, and I think it genuinely has to happen in that order.
The kiln that changed it all
I got my first kiln in 2019, and that was the real turning point. Not starting ceramics. Getting my own kiln.
Before that, I'd been taking every class I could, learning those foundations. The kiln changed all of it. Suddenly I was buying my own glazes, instead of using the limited few the studio offered, and the whole world of glaze and colour cracked open in front of me. And this is the part I love most: my painting history came alive again, right there on my forms.
The first pieces that truly felt like mine came once I had my own kiln and my own glazes, and the colour started coming alive. I was making functional things, cups, plates, bowls, teapots, and mixing all my glazes together, layering them up into beautiful, colourful combinations. That's when it became clear where I was going creatively.
It was never going to be JUST about form for me… but form also matters, deeply. The form and the glaze are in constant conversation, back and forth. Often the form itself dictates the glaze choice, the way a surface curves or the carving on the clay decides what the glaze can do on it. I especially loved bowls, partly because the risk of the glaze running was lower, but mostly because they gave me such a generous, open surface to paint into. The forms became blank canvases for my painting with glaze, and the canvas and the painting were shaping each other the whole time.
Chasing the surface I couldn't name yet
There were certain effects I kept chasing without knowing what was creating them.
Sometimes a glaze, or a couple of glazes layered together, would do something extraordinary in the kiln. The surface would break and move and separate, into this almost bubbling, cell-like world of its own. It reminded me instantly of my acrylic pours. The same swirls, the same cells, the same little universes forming on their own. There it was again, that gap, that collaboration with the universe, only now it was happening inside the heat of the kiln where I couldn't even watch. I have always been chasing that.
I didn't know the chemistry yet, and honestly I didn't need to know. I genuinely thought it was magic, and I still think part of it is. I would chat to the talented glaze wizard, Ryan, who makes the glazes at Midnight Ceramics, and tell him about the wonders coming out of the kiln, and he would decode it into the science I didn't quite yet understand. Things like phase separation, where two materials interact and create an oil spotting effect, similar to the cells coming up through the layers of paint in an acrylic pour.
Slowly I started to recognise what I'd been drawn to all along. The same results my eye kept reaching for in glaze were the ones I'd chased across every medium of my life, long before I had any words for it. There was a through line, and it was mine.
That was the real lesson. I didn't need to understand the chemistry yet to trust myself, although I did find it fascinating and would slowly build foundational knowledge there. I just had to follow what I was drawn to, because those instincts were already pointing me toward my own style. My preferences weren't something to second-guess. They were me as an artist.
Wrapping up the chapter: a course to pass it all on
This whole stretch, the making and the mess, the painting, the pouring, the layering, the years of learning clay and then mixing commercial glazes and chasing colour and surface, has built into something I'm finally ready to hand over.
I'm putting together my Glaze Application Online Course, the culmination of this entire painting-to-glazing journey. It's everything I've learned about applying glaze, all the techniques I've come up with, how I prep my pieces, the colourful layering, how to read and fix glaze problems when they show up. It's the hands-on companion to my book, Finding Your Voice in Glaze. The book is the mindset, the permission, the why. The course is the how. Together they will hold everything I've gathered, right up to the edge of where the luster begins.
This isn't me closing a door, because I still love glazing this way and I always will. It feels more like reaching a natural marker, a point where I want to gather it all up and pass it on properly, even as I follow my curiosity into what's next.
And what's next is in glaze luster
Everything in this story, the colour from a place I don't remember, my mum's pouring, the layering instinct that has followed me through every material, that gap where I hand the work over and let the universe collaborate, the bubbling, cell-like surfaces I chased for years before I had any words for them… all of it led me to luster. The iridescent, rainbow-shifting, light-catching surfaces I make now.
And luster is where that letting-go lives most of all. There is even more of the gap in it, even more unknown. Multiple firings, an almost absurd amount of technical skill and control needed at every stage… and then, ultimately, you hand it all over to the elements and allow. That tension, the mastery and the surrender held together at once, is a big part of who I am as an artist. It's fringe, it's rare, and I love that about it.
But that's the next story. For now, this is where mine began.
If you're looking to open up your own creativity around glazing, my book Finding Your Voice in Glaze is available now. It's about discovery, experimenting, and the joy of testing your way to glaze surfaces that are truly your own, less a rulebook, more a permission slip to find your own voice… And my comprehensive Glaze Application Online Course, the hands-on how to everything I've shared here, is on the way later this year. Jump on my mailing list and you'll be the first to know when it opens.