In Oscillating, I bring clay into contact with industrial materials, including copper, iron, aluminium, metal mesh, metal oxides, quartz, and flock fibres. Rather than following a conventional sequence of bisque and glaze firings, I use repeated firings to intensify their reactions. Heat, shrinkage, melting, and fracture bring about changes that I can set in motion but cannot fully prescribe. The kiln compresses transformations that evoke geochemical processes into the time of making.

“Oscillation” describes the movement between collapse and formation within these works. Some metal melts or ruptures; other parts remain where clay shields them. Clay contracts, opens, and sometimes fuses again. I work with these changes through an anti-craft approach that leaves room for the materials to act. Clay becomes a participant in the process, recording the pressures and movements produced by its encounters with metal.

The resulting forms sit uneasily between geological residue, industrial debris, and something bodily. Across the series, pale crusts give way to pink or red interiors; cavities open through rough skins; metallic areas draw the eye towards what appears hidden or valuable. Oscillating 3.1 makes that attraction especially visible through its golden interior, while the small forms of 3.2 and 3.3 retain the suggestion of vessels or passages even as their possible functions become uncertain. The more extended forms of Oscillating 4 can appear like groups of bodies at one distance and fragments of terrain at another.

These shifts in scale and recognition matter to the work. An opening may look like a wound, a shelter, or a place of extraction, depending on how we approach it. The fractured skins and interior spaces are traces of material events, but they also invite us to notice how quickly we give those events familiar meanings. Oscillating asks what making becomes when material behaviour can redirect intention, and when a form holds several possible histories at once.