Kirsty graduated from the Fine Art: Painting and Printmaking course at Glasgow School of Art in 2009. She subsequently attended life sculpture classes which led her to working with clay.
Inspired by day-to-day experiences, local landscape and wildlife, Kirsty’s ceramics are an exploration of gesture, form, colour, and place. There is a rich tradition in ceramics of painting onto clay to document the world and to tell stories. Her work is a contemporary continuation of this; specific places and memories are all referenced in her work.
Kirsty’s background as a painter shapes her making process and is evident in her vessels. She creates hand-built earthenware forms that playfully imagine clay as the canvas. She employs traditional pottery decorative techniques alongside mark-making usually associated with abstract expressionist painting to create lush, layered surfaces.
“On a technical front, I like playing around with layering different colours, textures and glazes.”