I spent twenty years shaping
how things looked.
Then I wanted to know how they felt.
A journey from visual design to the weight of clay, the permanence of a cut,
and the quiet of the studio.
Not in the hand, exactly. In the making. The specific weight of a decision that cannot be undone. A cut, a fold, an edge left raw because smoothing it would have been a kind of forgetting. I wanted to work in that register. Close. Irreversible. Mine.
Clay found me first. Or I found it. I am still not sure which. What I know is that shamot does not forgive inattention. It holds the record of everything: the pressure, the doubt, the moment the tool slipped and the piece became something I had not planned. I stopped fighting that. The unplanned thing is often the truest thing.
Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once,
with beauty and courage.
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I carve rather than build. I begin with a solid mass and remove what does not belong. There is a long tradition of this in Japan, in stone, in ice, in wood. The idea that the object already exists inside the material and the maker's work is simply to find it.
I am learning to trust that.
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I travel with my eyes open to old things. A loom still running in a village no one visits. Glazing techniques passed between hands for four hundred years. A form so perfectly resolved it has never needed to change.
These things ask something of me.
I bring the question home and try to answer it.
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