‘It seems that making art is chasing after an elusive dream of perfection that sits somewhere in my head. It will not go away, even after fifty years of trying. After all this time the process of holding materials, rubbing, crushing, cradling or just placing them violently or tenderly, is what it’s about. Every action is a stream of discovery of something that hasn’t existed before – it’s a miracle and a bloody disaster. And so every sculpture leads to the next piece in the great puzzle. Much of this work is initiated in the subconscious. The different processes connect me with something physical or metaphysical that needs to be understood. In this way I discovered and dealt with past trauma. Things that didn’t make sense but once transposed into clay became obvious. In this way personal experiences were opened out into universal experiences.’

Amy Dempsey is an art historian and writer with experience working and writing for different audiences and media, writing books and online texts for the general public, experts and children. Her experience spans the academic, museum and commercial art worlds in London, New York and Washington DC. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts.|Almuth Tebbenhoff was born in north-west Germany in 1949, visited England on a student exchange and stayed. After studying Ceramics at Sir John Cass School of Art during 1972–5, she set up a sculpture studio in a church hall in London in 1981. She taught at Byam Shaw and Loughborough College of Art and Design. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Sculptors since 2003 and Vice President since 2019, she has exhibited in the UK, Germany, Italy, Russia, USA and Hong Kong.