Bonbon Series Entity Smaller

This is one of a new brilliantly coloured playful series of green and red marine inspired entities I have recently completed. It is named for fun after both the childhood favourite lollies Fruit Bonbons and the crackers my family would have on birthdays and Christmas, often at the same time :)

This one is called 'Entity' and is the larger of a pair of the same name. They are unsettlingly head-shaped, round, with what looks like mobile and responsive feeding tentacles emerging from a crevice where a 'face' might be expected.
The glaze surface is beautifully glossy and slightly crazed close-up, the background a transparent light green over a white clay, with dark green and blue/brown variegated patches, the tentacles are a lovely deep solid mid red. Looking closely at their base, blue/green shows through in some areas here too. The underside is a mixed green and terracotta colour.
The piece is asymmetrical and tactile, a strange organism in the process of unfurling or withdrawing its feeding arms in response to changes in its immediate environment. It says "I know what I am" even if the viewer does not :)

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I am mostly self-taught, creating biophilic, tactile ceramic and mixed media sculptures inspired by my life-long personal interest (obsession) with, and professional practice in, the study of non-human life and lives on this living planet.
My background is in biology, ecology, anatomy and veterinary medicine with a particular emphasis on form and function and the interplay between the two.
I also have a particular interest in the blurry boundaries and liminal zones found everywhere, when you look closely enough - from the gradation between the states of life and death (death being a process not an event, biologically speaking) to the difficulty in defining, at magnification, the edges of anything that from a distance looks like an individual entity (cell, organism, species, ecosystem etc).
Fascinations abound.

But the world is not an entertainment theme park, what lives inevitably dies, and we humans are just the same as everything else.
Feeding on and consuming materials/organisms from the surrounding environment is necessary to build and repair bodies.
Reproduction is not exactly voluntary, from a modern legal perspective.
Predation, parasitism, a very large number of microscopic disease-causing organisms, accidents and the eventual decay of age for those managing to survive long enough are inherent in the system.
This is also life.

My small to medium size sculptures are all unique, created intuitively, hand built in clays, my focus on the creation of biologically coherent forms with internal integrity even if the subject is a creation of imagination.
They are a meditation for me, and I hope to share that grounding with the observer - a respectful curiosity, inviting to be carefully held or touched and considered more deeply than the fast and disposable world we have created for ourselves that is causing us and the living planet so many problems.

Please note I am not currently in a position to accept commissions, and communications may be delayed.