Ashley Knight
BA (Hons) Product Design and Craft
Living Heirlooms
I specialise in hand-built ceramics; making my own batches of stained clay, to construct one-off pieces. I find joy in ensuring that I never make exactly the same object twice. While uniformity is important within my collections of work, each piece must remain unique in some way, allowing it to have impact as an individual object as well as part of an ensemble.
Much of my work, including my most recent project, ‘Living Heirlooms’, centres around the themes of family and ancestry, with a focus on taking traditional concepts and adapting them to fit into a contemporary context. With each project, I enjoy exploring historical archives as well as working directly with family groups. I then translate my findings into a body of work designed to both celebrate and serve the user. It is important to me that the theme of ‘family’ remains at the forefront of my work, with each piece that I make being designed to not only promote interaction with the objects themselves, but to promote interaction between people; creating lasting, meaningful connections between people and objects.
