Serena Maria Dicks is a process-oriented ceramicist whose practice explores gesture as a methodological tool to uncover traces of process, memory, and material history. Working in clay, she investigates the interplay of form and surface, often drawing on ancient Cypriot ceramics and wider ceramic histories while reimagining through touch, movement, and gestural abstraction.

Gesture and exaggeration form the foundation of her methodology. Both terms share the Latin root gerere, “to carry,” reflecting an embodied act in which the body imparts action and intention into the material. Through hand building, press-moulding, and surface manipulation, she explores how repetition, rupture, and gestural movement with clay can evoke traces of past processes while allowing surfaces to emerge and evolve. 

Her work is attentive to the physicality of clay, opting for raw, slip-coated surfaces, echoing a sense of deep time, where form and surface coalesce, and gestures leave a record of both body and process. Automatic writing and iterative mark-making provide stimuli for experimentation, transforming traditional techniques into contemporary, expressive acts of making.

Serena’s practice is deeply informed by her British-Cypriot heritage, drawing inspiration from ancient artefacts and sites of antiquity. Through tracing the lineage of objects, she seeks to create a dialogue between past and present, material and body, tradition and transformation - offering new grounds of cultural and material heritage.