Processes

I wanted to make pottery long before I first found a place with the facilities to make it. Consequently, by the time I arrived in the studio for the first time, I had a sketchbook full of ideas. My drawings were ideas that were not massively influenced by the material, because it had been a long time since I had used clay. Of course they were influenced by clay and what I imagined I might be able to do, but not the subtleties of the process of working with clay. Consequently some of the ideas were quite complex and ambitious structures. This was good. It meant that when I began, I had set myself a series of complex challenges.
After a few years of working with clay, I drifted out of sketching my ideas on paper. I made them in clay to sketch them. I made another one to refine the idea rather than rubbing out and redrawing as one would on paper. Drawing continued, but as a thing in its own right. So I gave this some thought a while ago, and decided that there might be something to be gained from returning to my original paper sketching. That it could be interesting to get back to this for a while. So that is what I have been doing. Sketching and researching and sketching and then sketching again some of the ideas, and this time swapping from paper sketching to clay sketching to paper again to clay again and so on. One of the results is that I am developing more and more two dimensional work, and I have been painting too. My new experiments with clay have taken me in unexpected directions. So whilst I am not quite ready to share my experiments with the world just yet, I am very excited about this experimentation and development, and can't wait to get things firmed up into some more finished pieces!