Holly Dawes

The beach is where I collect a lot of my materials. This beach is feral and precarious. To access the beach, I go past the ‘Danger do not cross’ sign and climb down past the cliff of shards where you can see the layers of broken pottery from when the place was a dump - a perfect place for throwing things off the edge of the world. Further along you can walk for a mile on a cracked clay path that feels like a desert to a plateau of clay. Walking and sleeping on clay inform my practice. As I walk, I collect things that I am drawn to; nuggets of clay and minerals. The clay is blue, yellow, pink and grey and the landscape changes after heavy rain. My work is mostly instinctually made. I do have ideas about how the work should look, but they are not exact - I want to leave space for the unexpected. I’m playing with the edge of what is controllable and what is out of my control.