I had an eccentric childhood based in the academic enclave of Victorian Gothic North Oxford where my mother ran a boarding house for overseas postgraduate students. My father lived in elective poverty on a primitive farm outside the city free from telephones, electricity and which provided an escape from an insistently classical education in art and literature. The Pitt-Rivers ethnological collection of the university museum to which I was taken from an early age provided a regular imprinting of art from West Africa particularly. A brother who began to work in Africa and collect woodcarvings there, familiarized certain images further.

What is to be done with our over imaged landscape if something enduring is to result? Clay, wood, stone demand effort in a way that is reassuring. Basic materials also give continuity with the past and its images. The gritty texture of the grogged clay I use in coiling and slabbing provides a pleasing resistance to fussiness and detail.

I have recently met Nigerian potter and sculptor Ojo Ogogo who exhibits in Europe and New York. His views on several pieces were thought provoking as was a suggested collaboration at some stage.