Living as I do in Okehampton on the edge of Dartmoor for the last sixteen years the vessels and sculptural forms I produce take their decorative inspiration from the local landscape. The dramatic curves and dips, vistas, colours and contours of the moor, as well as the rivers and pools, and the iconic shapes of the rock formations all inspire my work, sometimes on a completely subconscious level. My Pieces are handbuilt in stoneware. They are then decorated with coloured slips and oxides, using a wax resist method to achieve the desired decorative effect. The work is then bisque fired several times to approx 950 degrees and finally high fired to a temperature of 1180-1200 degrees. They are finally polished with beeswax.
Janie studied Ceramics and Glass at Leicester Polytechnic in the late 1970s and was then lucky enough to gain a Turkish Government Scolarship to take up a place at the Academy of Fine Arts (Guzel Sanatlar) in Istanbul and also travel to the mosques and factories of provincial Turkey to study their exquisite ceramics. In the mid 1980s she worked at Dover Museum in Kent drawing Medieval and Roman ceramic ware for Archaeological reports. She set up her first ceramic studio in Kent in the early 1990s, moving to rural N/W Devon in 1999, and then subsequently to Okehampton.