Artist Hattie Hambridge observes ceramicist and shapeshifter Holly Dawes on the beach, in words and pictures.

The first time I saw them was through a window: giant pots stood tall on white plinths, otherworldly and alive. Their forms seemed both liquid and fixed, heavy and light, their textures begging to be touched. Surfaces like the rugged skin of Mars or Jupiter.

I met their maker Holly Dawes later, on the coastline between Hastings and Rye, at Pett Level, one of her favourite spots to dig up clay, and the same stretch of beach I grew up on.

All of Holly’s creations are hand-built from clay she collects locally. Her process is slow, tactile, and open to the unexpected. “We are like clay,” she tells me. “We fluctuate, can be moulded, fixed, and shaped.” Holly is interested in how clay holds memory and mirrors the body. “Clay is soft, strong, and shaped by its environment.”

Holly’s practice is intuitive, grounded more in curiosity than formal training. As we walk beneath the cliffs, she scours rock pools and crumbling rock faces for clay. Each location she forages offers something new – a shift in tone, texture, or behaviour. She tells me she knows where clay lies by how it feels underfoot: soft, forgiving, impressionable.

Her work begins with discovery. The found clay is not merely material but collaborator – its character guiding form and process. Rather than follow the conventions of traditional ceramics, Holly embraces unpredictability. Her methods are experimental, allowing for chance, imperfection, and the raw logic of nature.

As she builds, Holly pushes each form to its threshold, flirting with collapse before rescuing it mid-fall. The resulting vessels hold this tension, poised between defiance and surrender. They feel like bloated bellies, dimpled cheeks. Like forms echoing the cliffs around us, the compressed lines of sandstone and clay, the gentle curves carved by salt and tide.