Pamela Jane Mcnicol Pudan

I am a ceramic maker who divides her time between the rural depths of Devon and the rush of central London.

I returned to the UK several years ago, after living for 20 years in Sydney where I trained and worked in Psychoanalysis. It was in 2011, while taking a break from my career, that I discovered ceramics. What began as a casual interest soon became a burgeoning obsession - one that has me in its grip still. I completed a Diploma in Ceramics in Sydney in 2013 and spent the next few years taking part in numerous exhibitions and competitions, and making commission pieces.  

When I am not up to my elbows in clay I am restoring my home, which is a de-commissioned psychiatric clinic.

I am interested in exploring anomaly and the place that it has in our society - how it can occupy its own space, affirm its own existence, claim its own beauty. 

My work comes from my experience of growing up in a family with disabled parents, and the way that experience has shaped who I am and what I make. From this starting point I hope to visit questions that are relevant to us all - those of belonging, otherness, protectiveness and growth. 

The use of hand building methods such as pinching and press moulding allows me to create complex sculptural pieces that reference, but do not mimic, natural growth patterns. By using a commonality of building blocks, patterns are established which can then be subverted, establishing a nod to cell division and anomaly. My aim is to create pieces which are related but all unique and complex, drawing a link to the complexity we all carry, as bodies, as selves, as members of groups. 

“I shall never be

Different. Love me.”

(excerpt from Hymn to St. Cecilia, W.H. Auden)

(photograph @katiaautier)