Joseph Agius, a senior staff nurse at FairyLand ward for the past 30 years, started out as a hobbyist in ceramic sculpture and is now established as one of Malta’s foremost ceramists. His profession as a nurse exposes him to a world whose fabric can include pain, disease, despair and death. World news is also a source of inspiration. Thus, he tends to favour a social neo-realist aesthetic. Joseph chooses linguistic metaphors and figures of speech as springboards for his creations, hence the titles of his works have a metaphorical origin which he subsequently interprets as a narrative in clay.