The red deer of Exmoor are elusive creatures. For a fleeting moment you see them, then they are gone. Ceramicist Jacqueline Leighton Boyce stores up sightings on the moor, then recreates them as delicate illustrations on clay.

The surfaces of her hand-shaped pots – created in an old cow barn on her parents' farm near Dulverton – are her canvases. She doesn't use a potter's wheel, but works the clay, red terracotta, into shape with her fingers.

Her vivid palette and patina is built up through slips and glazes in successive firings in the kiln, in another building across the snowy garden.

And as the weather held the moor in its icy grip this winter, Jacqueline was working long into the night, preparing new work, inspired by the tale of the mighty Emperor stag.

Her ten vessels, each with a chapter in the story of the beast, go on display at the Open Eye Gallery in Edinburgh at the end of this month.

The saga of this majestic beast has fascinated the folk of Exmoor this autumn. Pictures of the eight-foot high stag taken by Western Morning News photographer Richard Austin started a media frenzy.

Richard named him the Emperor, as he was larger than a King, the title given to a stag with at least 12 points on his antlers.

The photographs of the bellowing beast – taken at the start of the October rutting season – sparked interest in the Exmoor stag around the world.

"It became national news, and everyone wanted to know where it was and people had different theories," says Jacqueline.

"I thought I'd like to find this stag as well and we heard rumours that it was in the Barle Valley, near where I live, so I spent a couple of afternoons walking through the valley with my dog."

She followed up reports that a huge stag had been sighted at Marsh Bridge, crossing the River Barle near Dulverton.

"I had been told that this was where the stag was, and I got there and there were two experienced deer stalkers with binoculars and they looked at me with suspicion.

"I said 'is this where the big stag is?' and they said yes, that it was down at the bottom of the valley. Unfortunately, my binoculars were terrible, so I couldn't see anything. But I waited until they were gone and I went over the gate."

Under a tree, she saw a majestic stag bellowing beneath the branches of a tree. Was he the Emperor or not?

Jacqueline was never quite sure, but the sense of being on a quest in this most romantic of landscapes is told through her ceramics, in the exhibition, I Wanted to Find the Emperor.

She heard later that the Emperor had been shot on land near Tiverton, further south of the moor, so the rumour went, by trophy hunters, looking to sell his magnificent antlers for hundreds of pounds.

In telling the story she conjures up just how much the red deer are part of Exmoor, their last bastion in England.

Jacqueline grew up horse-riding and hunting on the moor with the Devon and Somerset Staghounds, until as a young teenager a painful form of osteoarthritis – ankylosing spondylitis – halted her in her tracks and stopped her schooling. She could no longer ride, although she carried on exploring the valley on foot.

In her early 20s, Jacqueline did O-level art at night school, then did an art foundation course at the Somerset College of Arts and Technology (now Somerset College) in Taunton.

"As soon as I touched the clay I knew it was what I wanted to do," she says.

Keeping off the pain of her arthritis with painkillers, she went on to study for an HND in ceramics at Falmouth College of Art. "I still went to every student party, I had a great time."

Then she had her hips replaced (she's since had this operation a further four times) which made it possible for her to go to London to study ceramics at Central St Martins.

Here, inspired by tutors like renowned ceramicist Richard Slee, she gained a first class degree and an MA in ceramics illustration.

After many years away, working in London and America, Jacqueline came back to Exmoor, and started making work inspired by its natural beauty. And the red deer she glimpsed, occasionally, on her afternoon walks, found their way into her work.

"I find them really inspirational, the fact that they are so wild," she says. "Ponies are lovely to watch, but they don't have that same wild spirit. There is something about the deer which is really majestic and fascinating.

"We quite often get huge herds of them, particularly in the summer, which come right up to the window - and up close they are really quite ugly, but it is when they move that they come into their own.

"They have this ability to disappear, they just seem to be part of the Exmoor landscape and I get a bit upset when people try to contain them, by building up private herds."

The spirit of the deer is captured in her illustrations on her clay vessels which are decorated by her illustrations.

They are at once delicate and reminiscent of primitive cave art, brushstrokes etched into slips, white liquid clay put on as a first coat over the earthenware while still wet.

"I paint a layer of that over it, and then draw into it. I scratch into it, so that the red clay comes through."

She fires her work three or four times, bringing out the vividness of the colours and, finally, adding touches of gold and mother-of-pearl.

While the illustrations on the vessels are delicate, the pots themselves are deliberately rugged in style.

"People either love or hate my work," says Jacqueline. "If they like porcelain vessels, they probably won't like mine.

"I like people to think that is definitely clay when they look at them. They can see the fingermarks which show it was once a soft material and can see how they are made."

The other distinctive feature of her work is that tells a story. The part-mythical, part-real tale of the Emperor is told in ten drawings on each vessel.

"It is a whimsical narrative, the story of this particular stag. At the moment I'm making the last two," she says.

Her final one tries to get to the heart of what the red deer mean to the people on Exmoor.

"No one on Exmoor will get sentimental over one particular stag but they are passionate that there will forever be healthy herds of red deer on the moors," says Jacqueline.

"With this in mind, the last piece of work I am making for this exhibition is saying that there will always be an Emperor of sorts on the moor."