“When you’re working with clay you’re in dialog with it, when you touch it, it reciprocates. It is a sensual material. You need to sense it with one or more senses: your vision, hearing, smell, taste.
It’a a sacred moment when you’re trying to be one with the material. I’ve tried very hard to keep the rational thoughts away. Reflecting in work, not being dictated by what you think it ought to be. Prototyping is planning before and after, it’s important to go through that process. By doing that you learn what not to do. But when you make the project and go back to the initial sketches/models/ideas, you can see the genealogy. When you have that genealogy you can do without thinking, you can be with the flow, be at one with the process. You’re working vwry often with friction and that’s the challenge. Why clay in particular? It aks curiosity of you, of what will emerge. The dialog with clay allows the curiosity to take it in different directions. Curiosity is also the fear of what you might discover. Of doing something you think is a failure and mistake, and you learn to embrace that. Rather than seeing it as a process of learningit’s a process of selection. To be able to say that something you thought initially as successful, doesn’t actually work. The courage to do something different, lateral thinking. Looking for solutions that are not linear. Either it’s guess work based on logical assumptions or it’s intuition. It’s also a combination of using knowledge, self knowledge, intuition and practice, and above all time. An accumulation of practical knowledge
I see clay as liquid sculpture, the colour gets in the way of form for me. You don’t have to be techincally brilliant, you can see the form rather than technical perfection”
The difference between the craft of it or the art of it. A lot of artists think craft is important. But the craft is extremely important, bu it shouldn’t end up leading the work(if that’s what you really want)” It’s the question of the craft knowledge and the artistic knowledge, they aren’t always consonant. It’s not really so important nowadays in Modernism, Postmodernism and Metamodernism