Karen Banks is a ceramic artist who expresses her love of the natural world and the vessel forms created by nature, by producing handbuilt pieces with an organic quality, marked by the elemental forces of fire and smoke. Karen’s inspirations come from the natural world, and the beauty in found objects. Unearthing pieces of broken ceramic particularly interests her, made of clay which comes from the earth, to end up returning to the earth to be discovered like a piece from some historical jigsaw. Karen sets out to create a sense of the unearthed and ‘found’ in her work. She enjoys the unpredictability of smoke firing, it enhances the organic and natural quality of the individual pieces. Karen handbuilds her work from a mixture of stoneware and porcelain clays, using a combination of pinching, pressing and scraping techniques for the small vessels, moulding and coiling for the large vessels.