About

 How my love of the Brighton Museum and Toby jugs inspired my sculpture

Born in Brighton, and since a child, I made regular trips to the Brighton and Hove museum which at that time had a beautiful, well-furnished library. For me, the museum became an essential part of my life: for books, for inspiration, for humour, and for nostalgia. It summed up everything I knew and loved about Brighton. 

Downstairs there was a beautiful gallery of deco furniture, ceramics, and paintings which could be viewed as well from the upstairs tea rooms. I spent many days revisiting the gallery gloating at the deco artefacts and beautiful, inspiring ceramics.

When I returned many years later after a long sojourn in London, I found the museum had undergone a dramatic overhaul, and the new layout drew me to the ceramics display which was absolutely stunning. So engaged was I with the wonderful idiosyncratic, unique designs, that I was completely unaware that I was the last person in the museum. But, luckily, the kindly security guard let me linger just a little longer, and that was the visit that sewed the seeds for a future project.

Much later on, when on one of my long thinking walks, and when Boris Johnson was Mayor of London, I suddenly saw the perfect subject matter for a ceramic figure. And since I loved the humour of the Toby jug format, I decided to take inspiration from this particularly English genre of ceramic sculpture and produce something that explored this ceramic theme.

My Boris Johnson sculpture intentionally doesn't conform to the Toby jug format of handle and jug, but borrows the humour and fun of Toby jugs and blends it with the character of Boris Johnson. During Boris's time as Mayor of London, he was well known for his love of cycling to work each day, and well known for his humorous antics. So it was a wonderful challenge to combine a figure with a bike, with plenty of humour and fun, but which would also be anchored in time by a unique, historic event: the 2012 Olympics in Britain.