Here, I get to play with the appendage of the knob making nests w/eggs sometimes or as the subject matter on the pot indicates, maybe a flower blossom…a small mix of sculpture and pottery making.
Over the years I’ve worked with very complex geometries while making pottery. Here I work with the simplest form: a cylinder. Figuring out how to activate such a static form has given me countless hours of pleasure.
These covered jars are fun to make as they afford me a larger surface area for story telling. My current themes are:
Crows moving eggs around the lower parts of the cups are creatures working in concert.
Where there’s a crow with an egg in it’s mouth and another screaming it’s “Caw-Caw-Caw” at it, the screaming crow usually has feathers turning into eggs as you turn those cups around. These are all about abundance and scarcity…about what we ‘think we know’ and how, when we get uber focused like that, we miss obvious things going on around us.
I look forward to more stories surfacing as I practice, play and stay open in my studio.
Technical Info
Technical Info My functional pottery is made from an earthenware recipe that I developed while I was a graduate student in Nova Scotia. For many years after grad school, I glaze fired to cone 04 which is the convention in this country. In 2005 while I was doing my residency at the Australian National University in Canberra, the other potters there innocently asked, “Why do you glaze fire at ‘bisque’ temperatures?”. That was the first indication I’d ever had that cone 04 might be a suspect temperature to fire earthenware. But I brushed it off mostly because my practice with it was supported by US studio potter standards for terra cotta. Shortly after returning to the States, I offered a workshop at Arrowmont School of Art and Craft in Gaitlinburg, TN. There, fate gave me a GIANT gift…one of my students in this handbuilding class was a ceramic engineer. Go figure. These folks typically never show up in these sorts of classes. But Karla Wagner is anything but “typical”. She and I forged a professional relationship and friendship from that time onward. Karla helped me see the virtue of ‘buying’ temperature for my earthenware. She and I worked together to formulate a satin clear glaze and move my firing temperature up to cone 1-2. All this just to say, these pots are strong, strong, strong. When you knock on them they ring like porcelain. They can go in the microwave without heating up their handles (which happens to lower fired pots). They’re in and out of my dishwasher daily. They even have less than .5% absorption which means anything I make for the garden can live outside in the frozen NE winters w/out breaking.
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Here, I get to play with the appendage of the knob making nests w/eggs sometimes or as the subject matter on the pot indicates, maybe a flower blossom…a small mix of sculpture and pottery making.
