I began to make handmade paper from the riverside vegetation before the ceramics as a way of continuing my paintings of the meadows where I live  giving an even greater sense of place by including the plants in the paper they were painted on. As I began to experiment with clay, I discovered that I could incorporate the paper and the plant fibres into the clay making a strong and yet thin paper like clay sheet which could be formed into different shapes than using the clay on its own. I am still experimenting with this technique and using it with the local clay from Kirkham which is abundant and quite a pure terracotta earthenware. There was a Roman pottery very close to here which produced thousands of pots for the North of England and I feel a real sense of history by using the same clay to create my pots, and combining it with paper from the river grasses makes it truly unique to this place.