It’s often said that clay has a memory; it records every touch, just as the body, in its very cells, remembers what it has endured. In my new work I explore how the body holds unspoken memory; old stories rise and write themselves into our genes, echoes of fear and vigilance carried from past to present. Through clay l I trace embodied memory and the quiet weight of generational histories, the lingering presence of enslavement, displacement and otherness. The vessels – like our bodies – hold these memories as they enact themselves: fractures push outward unexpectedly, sometimes like splintered bone, sometimes as fleshy, organ‑like growths. Malignant masses form without warning, sparked by the small but relentlessly compounding lesions left by the tiny cuts of careless speech and blatant violence.

The material carries its own history of marginalisation. Long pushed to the edges of the art world, clay has been linked to the domestic, to women’s labour, and to the creative traditions of people of colour, rooted in communities whose work has repeatedly been dismissed or undervalued. Its inherited status as a material undervalued within the art world resonates deeply with the themes I explore, and working with clay allows me to reclaim and reframe that lineage. The physical push and pull of shaping the clay mirrors an interior world shaped by embodied memory, by race and gender, and by the long shadows of violence carried across generations. Through this process, the material becomes both witness and collaborator, holding what the body remembers.

For some of us, stress is not only situational but inherited. Generational trauma in the nervous system resurfaces as heightened anxiety and autoimmune conditions that flare when the body can no longer contain all it carries. It is as if memory breaks through the cells, an internal eruption shaped by everything the body has been asked to hold. To me clay mirrors this – resisting control it remembers pressure and refuses to hide its own history. It cracks when pushed too far, bulges under strain and behaves unpredictably. It reflects the psychological and social pressures many of us carry: the fractures, the vigilance and the inherited violences that surface when the world feels unstable.