Hello, I’m Anne McCrossan. I live in St Ives in Cornwall UK. I am a writer and artist working primarily in ceramics.
My focus is on themes of origin, identity, meaning and value, looking at who we are, what we make and how we connect.
Before working in ceramics, I had a business career in brand advertising, identity and change management, working with clients across a range of sectors and initially launching the Apple Macintosh in the UK in 1984.
In the early 2000’s my work shifted into digital business design, data strategy, digital enablement and quantified organisation, again working with a wide range of national and global organisations.
I like ‘firing synapses’, sparking ideas that might help rewire how we see things,.because I believe that in the digital world, how we connect, organise and power ourselves as one race - the human race - in the face of AI, is a critical issue that requires deep examination.
For me, the appropriate response has four parts:
Firstly, promoting the human ability to craft and create.
Secondly, consciously encouraging human imagination and critical thinking.
Third, by learning from and appreciating the ancients and their wisdoms - it’s that which got us to this point.
Finally, by valuing social and cultural difference and other contemporaries who are not like us. These, to me, are fundamental traits of humankind.
These attributes have been accumulated over time through the experiences of the generations that have gone before us. Now, they’re pivotal to our future as the competitive edge we humans have against the power of AI. They are attributes essential to us and central to humanity’s future as we witness the emergence of the digital age.
The actions we are all taking today happen in a speck in time - but together they are shaping humanity’s potential and its future at a critical inflexion point.
Never before have we co-existed with an intelligence equal to, or greater than, ourselves. I am compelled by that thought to make work that records this chapter this way, because we must remember and preserve, within ourselves, what it is to be human.
My interest is in mindful evolution, marking what I see as nothing short of an epochal shift within human history, the point where we transition from an analogue to a digitally-powered civilisation.
My writing and ceramics are thoughts about this time. I use clay - the recording material of choice for millennia - to mark this in a fashion that will hopefully be built to last.
My work experiences influence the approach I take. It supports an ideal - the ideal of a networked world in which open data drives social innovation, digital empowerment is by collective design, and the development of human individuality, agency and dexterity of art and craft coexist for the advancement of everyone.
That matters, because there’s a globally connected world in development.
Thanks for visiting my site. I hope you’ll find it interesting.