talking pots

I have worked with clay for decades, and I still return to the vessel. I started there because it was useful. You can hold it, fill it, pour from it, carry it. Over time I saw that use was only the beginning. A vessel also records pressure, heat, timing, and touch. It shows what my hands did and where they failed.

I learned this through repetition. I centered the same forms again and again until weight, drag, and balance became physical knowledge. I made walls too thin and watched them drop. I let pieces dry unevenly and saw rims split. I fired work that warped, blistered, slumped, or came out flat and dead. Those results changed how I worked. I began to pay close attention to shrinkage, glaze fit, firing range, and the point where control gives way to damage. When you look at these pieces, you are seeing those decisions made visible.

I also studied older vessels and the conditions that shaped them. Storage jars, cooking pots, ritual forms, burial wares. Their proportions were not arbitrary. A narrow neck slows pouring. A wide shoulder increases volume. Earthenware asks for one kind of handling, stoneware another. As forms moved between places and uses, they changed. I became interested in that shift. I did not see a clean divide between function and meaning. The same form could serve daily labor in one setting and ceremony in another.

That led me to the work I make now. I use the vessel to test how much information a form can carry without explanation. A curve can slow your eye or push it downward. A crack can read as damage, evidence, or intent, depending on its scale and placement. An uneven lip changes the body below it. A surface can absorb light or return it sharply. I do not treat these as decorative effects. I use them because they alter how you read the piece.

The empty interior matters to me as much as the wall. I think that is where the work becomes most exact. Space inside a vessel is not neutral. It sets pressure against the outside form. It can make a piece feel open, withheld, unstable, or fixed. I came to trust that absence can do real work if the form is precise enough.

In these recent pieces, I keep stripping away anything that feels automatic. I leave marks when they carry structure. I keep fractures when they sharpen the form instead of softening it. I do not want the work to perform polish for its own sake. I want you to meet the object directly and feel how it was made, where it resists, and what it refuses to settle into.