To born-and-bred landlubbers such as myself, estuaries can seem alien and slightly alarming places.
For one thing, the moonscape of wet mud left by the receding tide really might as well come from another planet. The tides themselves hint at unknown and unquantifiable danger. And then, there's all that wooden and metal debris lying around which speaks of a maritime way of life of which we know nothing.
But for ceramic artist Annie Turner, all this could hardly be more familiar or reassuring. She grew up alongside the estuary of the River Deben in Suffolk, where her family has lived for generations.
Although she now lives and works in south London, in recent years she has returned to home ground to find inspiration for her ceramic sculptures.
In River, the large exhibition of her work now showing at the RBSA Gallery in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter, there is a snapshot of three boys. One of them is her father, who actually died on the river, of a sudden heart attack, in 2003.
"He grew up on the river, and so did I - although I wore a life-jacket and he didn't," she says. "Basically the picture is there because it's quite rare nowadays that you spend a lot of time in the same place as your father.
"There are still lots of Turners in Waldringfield, the village I'm from. Sailing is very much in my blood, and one of my uncles is a boatbuilder."
Annie's sculptures borrow freely from the equipment and detritus you might find in the mud at low tide.
Most notably there is a series of cage-like structures which suggest metal but are actually laboriously constructed from rolled clay.
These are inspired by "sinkers", structures which would have been filled with stones and sunk into the estuary bed so that buoys could be moored to them.
"They could suggest a sense of entrapment, but they're the opposite of that, a metaphor for a sense of belonging, or a safe haven," she says, adding that nowadays, less romantically, a lump of concrete in an old tyre would serve the same purpose.
Other pieces are inspired by old ladders which are washed up with the tide, though in a dream-like way they taper at bow and stern, morphing into phantom boats. The Deben estuary is only a few miles from the site where Britain's most celebrated phantom ship, the Viking burial at Sutton Hoo, was discovered.
If they were made of different materials, you might almost imagine that some of these pieces were found objects, picked up along the shoreline.
"People ask why I don't make them out of metal, but they wouldn't have the fragility of clay," says Annie. On the other hand, they aren't as fragile as all that. The "sinkers", she points out, are robust structures because they are supported in all directions.
Even so, the weight of the damp clay can pull them into different shapes.
"They get to the point where they have a life of their own. The firing process quite often changes them further because I over-fire - I take the clay to the point of melting. You put it in a metal box and fire it to incredible temperatures - 1,230 degrees centigrade. It's out of your hands, and it's very exciting."
It's nearly 25 years now since Annie Turner graduated from the Royal College of Art. Is her work influenced by her contemporaries as well as her home surroundings?
"Very often you see a fragment of something in someone's work, but it's not necessarily the whole thing.
"If there's one person I really admire it's a woman Gillian Lowndes, who is now in her 70s. I'm very drawn to her work, and find it a very powerful body of work she's done over the years."
Contrary to what you might suppose, the RBSA Gallery is quite a grand space compared to those available in London.
"In London the galleries I've shown in have been tiny. So it's given me an opportunity to work on a large scale."
But there are also smaller pieces taking the form of small bowls - her most saleable, bread-and-butter pieces - and spoons. Both reflect the found textures of the estuary while the spoon handles take on references to the dilapidated jetties which span the mud.
"I think the ideas are all quite simple in essence," she says. "It's about my responses and how I feel about the place more about the place more than what it looks like. People think I'm off completely my trolley - I can sit there for ages and lose myself.
"When I make something it's the very act of making that piece that suggests what I make next. Ceramics is an incredibly complex medium and it takes a long time to build knowledge of what you can do with it. There's a phenomenal versatility to it - in a way it's the closest thing to painting."
River is at the RBSA Gallery, 4 Brook St, St Paul's Square, until Dec 1 (Mon-Fri 10.30am-5.30pm, Sat 10.30am-5pm; admission free).
