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that it can still be translucent and, when coupled with the right glaze, it
can be sublime.

My most recent work concentrates on this lovely flashed, naturally
impure porcelain stone. I have been honing my skills as an artist with
these materials and feel that this body of work 1s the culmination of so
much study and research, involving the hand selection of every stone,
its crushing, grinding and eventual reforming to produce these unique
pieces. Likewise the glazes are all created and fired using the same
alchemy and attention to detail. Simple stones, ashes, clay and lime can
be transmuted into soft pastel translucent colour with the hardness and
durability of porcelain.

I've thought a lot about my bowls and how I work with them.
Socrates urged me to examine my bowls well as the unexamined bowl
is a bowl not made. Over the past 30 years of ceramic practice, wood
firing and fossicking, I have made some good pots and many more
bad ones. I have been inspired by the rich surfaces that I have been
able to create from my unique approach, methods and materials, while
being compelled to progress by my failures. Sometimes my pots come
out much as I imagined them, and at other times, the pots were not as
expected, but I recognised that they were still either better or worse
than anticipated. Just every now and then I have made pots that I am
not entirely able to claim credit for (in their finished form,) as they
seem to have made themselves to some extent, and it 1s this precise
quality that has intrigued me tn particular recently.

These pots started life like any other, created with just as much
attention to detail and then glazed, packed and fired with equal effort
and consideration. However, because stuff happens, there are the
inevitable kiln collapses, stray wood stokes, explosions and disasters.
Unpacking events like these can be a bit depressing, perhaps more so
than the usual post-firing blues and initially these pieces were consigned
to the pot-holes in my driveway, where most of my work goes; all of
the indifferent, the bad and the ugly.

Over time I have learned to look very closely at my work and I never
crush anything in haste anymore. I have become practised at seeing the
unexpected possibilities of beauty in these ‘bads’ turned ‘goods’. ‘These
damaged goods can often be liberated from their cohort of dross and
polished to an unexpected state of grace.

I make my work as perfectly as I can, as a lot of itis porcelain and must
be thrown and turned evenly and precisely to allow the translucency to
show evenly. I can’t see any point in trying to compete with machine
perfection, that 1s so readily and cheaply available. However, if I were
to consciously twist or bend my pots on the wheel, I wouldn’t be able
to turn them evenly, and if I were to distort them after turning, I would
feel a little self-conscious about it. Porcelain needs to be turned so
much drier than plastic bodies and 1t would need to be re-hydrated to

contanued on page 8...

U——E—E———— — EEE OO)

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POTTERS

GUILD
«BRITISH