the story of arkard
the story of arkard began back in 2021, when i was transitioning away from painting and putting my hands to clay. we had just moved to cyprus. i was struggling to find materials for my oil painting projects and i was in a painting block that felt like a wall. i needed a change. i went online, found the makers space, and connected with the owner, lee-anne. speaking to her and hearing about clay sparked an excitement i hadn’t felt for a while. i immediately bought a few bags of clay, various types, to experiment with.
back home i set up an outdoor studio, so i could be messy and free of the constraints i’d built around painting. painting had become all about control: tiny brush strokes, careful surfaces, a constant tightening toward perfection. i wanted to rid myself of that. it had started to feel like a trap i’d built myself. i wanted to get out of my head and into my hands.
so i opened the first bag of clay. the earthy smell was comforting. the weight of it felt grounding, and the texture pressed back against my fingers and left their marks. i was ignorant of what was and wasn’t possible. i was overconfident, and i started experimenting to my heart’s content. it would catch up with me later, but it gave me a kind of freedom i wouldn’t have had otherwise. the sculptures that followed, including arkard, wouldn’t be what they are without that process. but at the time i was simply enjoying myself, finally feeling creative energy move through me again.
arkard began as an etruscan red, a clay body with a dark, ancient look about it after firing. into it i mixed old documents and papers i had lying around. i soaked them, added a dash of vinegar, then blended them into the clay. i needed to work in layers, the same impulse i had in painting, just transformed into a different material.
a vessel came first, with no clear plan of the final work, just responding as it built itself. i used a salad bowl as the base, building up sections, letting it dry in the cyprus summer heat. once it felt done, i started on the figure. looking back, i can see subconscious ideas playing out. life events entered the work whether i wanted them to or not. they shaped my subconscious and the choices i made. but i wasn’t trying to turn arkard into a statement. i was trying to let the work become what it needed, without forcing it to have a purpose. that’s still how i work.
then the clay started teaching me something else. before firing, pieces began breaking off. unfired clay is delicate, and i had to transport the work by car to the makers space, which is both a studio and a gallery. from there, lee-anne carried it into the kiln. the vessel was the most vulnerable part. the figure, by contrast, was created broken from the start: no legs, and one half of the arm missing. i built it to look damaged. what i didn’t know then was that the material itself would insist on the same language. even after firing, it didn’t stop. the clay would break where i hadn’t intended it to, as if it had its own idea of fragility.
i loved that about the piece, but it came with responsibility. it didn’t feel like something that could survive transport, and i couldn’t picture it surviving a sale either, not without losing what made it itself.
the makers space offered to showcase it in their collection. that felt right. it was safer there, and it gave arkard a chance to be seen and experienced without being handled too much.
two years later i heard the news that another section had broken off, this time from the rim of the vessel. seeing the broken pieces brought a real sense of loss, and a sense of failure. so much work to create, and yet so easily lost. it took a while to recover from that. my first reaction was blunt: it’s lost its balance, it’s lost its purpose. i suggested i take it back and put it out of sight for good. lee-anne and her husband sean (who runs the gallery) asked me to sit with it for a while. i agreed.
eventually i decided to take a risk. i wanted to keep its vulnerability, but give it a better chance of surviving long term. i made a new mixture of etruscan red and fibre and added it as a patch to the fired piece. then it sat drying and waiting, for months, until last week.
lee-anne and i discussed firing it higher than recommended, and i decided to take the risk. we both love experimentation, and with her firing expertise we pushed it from 1160°c to 1220°c. it could easily have gone the other way: warping, weakening, cracking, even losing the piece entirely. my hope was simple: that it would come out stronger, and that the addition would hold.
arkard gave me what i wanted. the colour surpassed what i had hoped for, a beautiful dark red-brown that suited the piece better. and most of all, it felt stronger, less prone to cracking. for now it feels like it might last beyond me.
