Laurie Jeanne is a ceramicist whose practice centres on Autobiographical Object-hood. This is a framework in which the vessel and the artist undergo the same event, and the clay carries the proof of it.
‘The oldest known fired ceramic objects have survived thirty thousand years. Every vessel I make might survive as long. That is not a grandiose claim — it is a material fact that changes everything about how I think about what I am making.’
Unpotes
Laurie Jeanne forms ‘unpotes’. These are hand-built companion vessels, made directly within specific environments: tidal, woodland, ecological.
‘The landscape is not backdrop. It is co-author — and more than that, it is author in its own right. When a river shapes a vessel, the river has made a decision. The marks left without my hand — tide impressions, bark contact, pebble drag, wave deformation. They are glyphs: indexical records of a specific encounter between vessel and place, authored by the environment itself.’
Chalk slip from the Sussex coast. Fire soot. Ink cap. Each piece carries the placeborne finish as a living surface — material from the land, returned to it through the object.
Ecological signature
In the context of a changing environment, this matters. The vessels Laurie Jeanne is making now in the ancient woodlands and tidal creeks of the Sussex High and Low Weald, carry the ecological signature of this precise moment. These include the species present, the mineral deposits, the seasonal conditions — into deep future time. Not as documentation. As living record.
The biography of a vessel
‘The vessel’s biography does not end at firing. It continues through breakage, repair, and the hands and environments it enters. The record is alive. The archive breathes.
Stoneware form shaped in surf at Stinson Beach. Fractured by tide and carried across ocean to Sussex.
The crack: ocean, a third wave, the biggest of the set. A surface compression where the wand passed over it at security. The crease where I sat on my suitcase to force it shut.
Biography written without intention. It is still teaching me something.
Mid-act. Its biography is ongoing.
‘I am drawn to GroundWork NetWork because the questions my practice raises — about deep time, material agency, ecological authorship — deserve to be in conversation with others asking adjacent ones.’
