Artist Statement

I have always had a keen interest in the sculptural aspects of functional forms.  I try to utilize whatever forming process or means of shaping clay into three dimensional volumes that occurs during the working process, and am particularly interested in the architectual edge and the tensile strength of the clay to assume certain types of volumetric curvatures when supported by a perimeter shape. I have worked as a stone mason for nearly fifteen years to support my pottery habits, and found this to have had a profound influence on my work. Throwing on slow, low momentum wobbly wheel and an attraction for the touch and mark making of the artists' hands to show on the clay has led me into an area of making that seems to reflect on Neolithic approaches to working and firing. The mechanical methods of throwing, coil, slab work, wood and paper patterns are used rather freely to continue to generate forms as they occur to me. I think that my approach to working in clay is as much, philosophical, as it is technical.

The reality that is the starting point of my work is the choice to investigate the formal range of the vessel structure in clay, and the belief in the potential that the images must entertain, suggest a narrative, and allude to things outside of themselves.  The largest question is how to invest my art with life, force, dignity and with a sensibility to the process and material.  I am interested in this process as a means to manifest ideas and form.  Catagories are not important.  The ongoing pursuit to enlarge the boundaries of conventional perceptions is essential.

I would hope in this work there is a glimmer of a unity that art has enjoyed in earlier ages and other cultures, when it has been less jealous of its autonomy, and more willing to share its functions with religion and magic.  For each of us, this work becomes a symbol for attitudes, sensibilities and philosophies, some of which are shared, by directly articulating the perception of the user/spectator whose world the work has entered.  The involvement with materials and making does not present itself as a dominant and simple factor, but rather as the center of a complex of ambiguities.