Five ceramic works produced for the exhibition "Kobold on the Unemployment Line" 2024

Scale Trees (Lepidodendron) were a unique, now-extinct leafless, densely-growing vascular plant which proliferated Earth during the Carboniferous Period, 350 million years ago. The bacteria normally responsible for the decomposition of organic material had not yet evolved to a form or degree as we would recognise it today - so as these early trees died and fell, rather than rotting and breaking down, the dead matter stacked in marshes and bogs and was compressed over hundreds of thousands of years. Much of the carbon-rich black coal we find on Earth today is a result of the dying of the Scale Trees of the Carboniferous.

“Scaled” are ceramic re-imaginings of the preserved bark of Scale Trees, an ‘oil-slick’ glaze and cobalt underglaze, single-fired