Hands and handling

Hands & Handling

I’m interested in making robust everyday ware that retains a natural look – that is ordinary and yet. It might intrigue due to surface properties like ash glaze draping and pooling, its calm strength of form and the thoughfulness of design that reveals itself in use, by making life easy in unexpected ways.

This is a communication from the hand of the maker to the hand of the user, a shared pleasure through the ages. Ancient pots reveal an intelligence of technique - reveal cultural habits, and adornment of the pots shows what matters to a person and the culture in the time taken.

I’d like my pots to convey a calm strength, to provide a moment of pause, appreciating what the pot has to offer about its past-in-the-making, and the moment of life.

My influences are; Jomon pots, the carving and layering up of the pot with coils; Korean copper oxide under Chun and the liveliness of form they impart, Phil Rogers’ simple ridges and robust forms that allow the Ash glaze to pool, the clean bloom of form that Cameron Williams' teaching conveys, and the mystery of naked raku where I learned to write in smoke from David Roberts one day at Guigong. I'm indebted to Walter Auer for setting me me more free with forms, and to Trisha Dean for imparting a love of line-blends - somewhere between alchemy and science. One launches out, alchemically, and finds one's way back to formulae. I like the calm strength of Katherine Pleydell-Bouverie who wanted her pots to evoke moss and stones rather than ancient China. I’m also drawn to Medieval British pots – slightly rugged forms, with coils pressed on the surface, attached and marked by the fingers of the maker, the inevitable small imperfections, the different finger widths.

I’m drawn to vitrified surfaces that flash at the edge of the clay body the way Oribe does on a dark iron clay. I like to see the clay something is made of. Like the side by side quality of the primitive and coarse and dry with the vitreous, cleanable, useful surfaces.

I’m a practical useful person but I love jewels and fragrance and silks and oils for my skin. I move very fast in life. So I’m drawn to that which calms me and causes me to reflect. Pots make me respect ancient cultures. I revere the craft of the makers and am quietly astonished by the longevity of pots.

I can't make sets of things. The best I manage to achieve is – “Family Resemblances”. This theme captures how we inspire each other by working alongside each other, and the fact that no two pieces are ever identical in pottery – they are unique. Perhaps, rather than industrial sameness – when things are made by bodies - all we need aspire to is a certain resemblance.