New Members of the Craft Potters Association | Michelle Young-Hares

The Macro Lens and the Clay

Contemporary Ceramics: You use macro photography to magnify and study the structure and growth patterns of plant forms before interpreting them back into clay. That movement — from the magnified photographic image to the three-dimensional sculptural object — is a fascinating translation. What happens in that interpretive space between the photograph and the clay, and does the camera ever reveal something in a plant form that then takes your work in a direction you hadn’t anticipated?

Michelle Young-Hares: I tend to work in quite an immersive way, so I will lose myself in a garden, photographing and exploring through the lens, capturing the shapes, forms, textures and colours.

Then, at a later stage, I examine the images and  draw the shapes and forms I see in my sketchbook, trying to catch as much detail as possible as this is the best way to truly examine the structures of botanical forms. The next stage is perhaps the longest, where this new information is absorbed. I spend a lot of time visualising forms and thinking about the essence of the structures-what is enticing or clever or beautiful, and then fill my sketchbook with ideas I feel are possible in clay.

The Known and the Unfamiliar

Contemporary Ceramics: You describe your sculptures as shifting between the known and the unfamiliar, which suggests you are deliberately unsettling the viewer’s relationship with the natural world rather than simply representing it. How do you calibrate that balance — and at what point in the making do you sense that a piece has successfully crossed into that more ambiguous, unfamiliar territory?

Michelle Young-Hares: I would say I do seek to represent what I see in nature, but placing something familiar in a different context requires us to reevaluate what we are looking at.

Growth as Sculptural Image

Contemporary Ceramics: Buds, seedpods, swellings and tendrils are all forms that contain potential — they are structures caught in the act of becoming something else. Is it that sense of arrested growth and latent energy that draws you to these particular forms, and how do you translate something as intangible as fecundity and potential into a static ceramic object?

Michelle Young-Hares: I am fascinated by the ingenious and complex ways nature has devised for reproducing itself.

Complexity and Joy

Contemporary Ceramics: You describe your constructions as complex, yet the spirit you bring to them seems rooted in joy and playfulness. Working with thrown, altered, handbuilt and carved elements across multiple firings must involve considerable technical demands and risk at every stage. How do you hold onto that sense of joyfulness through what must sometimes be an arduous and unpredictable process — and has a piece ever surprised you by emerging more joyful than you had intended?