On August 1, 2024 we welcomed Jennifer Lucy Allan to Ozora Studios in Margate for a unique event accompanied by ceramic sculptor Abigail Ozora Simpson.

Jennifer read from her book CLAY: A Human History, alongside live making from Abigail in her Jarrett's Yard Studio. 

Since Human history began, people have been taking handfuls of earth and forming them into their own image. Human forms are found everywhere there was a ceramic tradition, and there is a ceramic tradition everywhere there was human activity. The clay these figures are made from was formed in deep geological time. It is the material that God, cast as the potter, uses to form Adam in Genesis. Tomb paintings in Egypt show the god Khum at a potter's wheel, throwing a human. Humans first recorded our own history on clay tablets, the shape of the characters influenced by the clay itself. 

The first love poem was inscribed in a clay tablet, from a Sumerian bride to her king more than 4000 years ago, and this book is a love letter to clay, the material that is at the beginning, middle and end of all of our lives; that contains within it the eternal, the elemental, the profound and the everyday.

Born out of a desire to know and understand this material in both its micro and macro histories, Clay: A Human History combines the Jennifer's own experience with clay with archaeology and history, to tell the story about our relationship with this most profound everyday material.

Jennifer Lucy Allan is a writer, journalist and broadcaster with a PhD in foghorns. She has been a journalist for over a decade, writing on underground and experimental music for publications including The Guardian, The Quietus, and The Wire, and was previously The Wire's Online Editor. She is a presenter on BBC Radio 3's Late Junction, and wrote and presented Life, Death and the Foghorn for BBC Radio 4. She also runs the archival record label Arc Light Editions. Her first book The Foghorn’s Lament was published to critical acclaim by White Rabbit in 2021.

More on Jennifer Lucy Allan here: BBC Late Junction, Instagram
and Abigail Ozora Simpson here: Website, Instagram