For over five decades, Cherry Tewfik has shaped clay with the patient rhythm of the wheel, her hands guided by memories gathered across continents. Of Egyptian descent, her practice is deeply rooted in a multicultural heritage that spans from the sun-baked earth of North Africa to the lush landscapes of Southeast Asia, each place leaving its mark upon her work like sediment in stone.

Tewfik's journey began in the 1970s at Christ Church College in Canterbury, where she first encountered the transformative alchemy of fire and clay. Yet it was beyond the classroom walls – in the rural workshops of Kenya and Malaysia, the bustling markets of Singapore, and the ancient pottery traditions of South India – that her distinctive visual language truly emerged. Working alongside local craftspeople, she absorbed techniques and aesthetic sensibilities that would become integral to her practice, learning as much as she taught while establishing potteries in collaboration with the British Council and local museums.

The vessel forms that emerge from Tewfik's studio bear witness to this rich tapestry of influences. Rounded, organic shapes recall the water pots of rural Kenya, while intricate surface decorations echo the complex geometries found in Malaysian textiles and Islamic architecture. Her palette draws from memories of spice-laden markets and monsoon skies, earthy ochres meeting vibrant cobalt blues in surfaces that seem to hold light within their glazed depths.

Working primarily in stoneware and porcelain, Tewfik employs a vocabulary of techniques as diverse as her geographic inspirations. Gold and glass inlays catch and fracture light across sgraffito patterns that dance around the curves of her vessels. Multiple applications of glaze, pigment, and lustres build surfaces of extraordinary richness and complexity, each layer a deliberate choice in the slow construction of meaning. When disaster strikes – as it inevitably does in the ceramic arts – she has embraced the Japanese practice of kintsugi, transforming breakage into beauty through golden repair.

The process itself remains central to Tewfik's practice. The meditative act of throwing on the wheel provides what she describes as "enormous reward and excitement," a direct dialogue between maker and material that bypasses the intellect to speak in the ancient language of touch and intuition. Her work moves between gas, electric, and raku kilns, each firing method offering its own possibilities and uncertainties – a constant source of both "headaches and delight" that keeps her practice alive with discovery.

Through five decades of making, exhibiting from Canterbury to Kuala Lumpur, and teaching everyone from prison inmates to festival-goers, Tewfik has remained committed to the transformative power of clay. Her vessels are repositories of cultural memory and personal experience, each piece a small monument to the idea that art transcends borders, that beauty emerges from the meeting of tradition and innovation, and that the potter's wheel continues to turn, connecting us to the most fundamental human impulse to create meaning from earth, fire, and time.

Cherry Tewfik is a member of the Kent Potters Association and maintains her studio in Canterbury, where she continues to explore the endless possibilities contained within the marriage of clay and flame.