Cleo the Cat Reliquary Urn. 1998.

In the early Eighties I once lived in an end terraced house called Iona, which was a Christian community, shared with two other guys, Chris and Al. And Al had a cat called Cleo. When I moved in, generally speaking, I wasn’t keen on cats but this cat, Cleo, soon became keen on me. So, during the working week, the last person to leave Iona in the morning put Cleo out, which was Al. Coming back home to Iona from work, I was the first to arrive back, usually at the same time every working week day. Cleo very soon realised this and so on every weekday she was always waiting for me at the front door, at the same time as I arrived, to greet me, and for me to let her in. Once inside she made a big fuss of me being home. Of an evening when ever the three of us were in the front room watching TV, she would spend time with each of us, but Cleo always spent the longest time with me. She would jump up onto my legs, climb onto my chest, onto my shoulders, usually settling on my chest, looking at me and purring contentedly as I stroked her. When we retired to our respectively bedrooms she soon realised which bedroom I slept in. She would meow and scratch my bedroom door, so that I would have to get up and let her in. So when I slept in bed she slept on my bed or sometimes right by my pillow, so that when I woke up in the morning, she was there, already awake purring and looking straight at me.

​In the third year of the BA (Hons) Ceramics Degree BA course having made a ceramic memorial tablet for my family’s pet dog Pimmee, I decided that it would be fitting to make a ceramic reliquary urn for Cleo. I just thought that it would be interesting to combine the features of a cat with Gothic architecture, as I’m interested in architecture. I wanted to freely model the urn with my hands directly from my imagination, which is why I used paper clay, being easy to work with. I had to make the paper clay and there was enough paper clay to make two other smaller containers. I was invited to join the first year BA (Hons) Ceramics Degree course students for their pit firing at The Museum of Welsh Life, St Fagans, Cardiff and as an experiment my paper clay urn and containers were fired alongside their work. I believe that the result is a very individualistic urn, which represents Cleo’s character perfectly.