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My home for the past 46 years has been a 200+ year old stone house in the village of Amity, PA in Washington County. The barn, of a similar vintage as the house, has been the site of my studio, where I have made thrown and handbuilt stoneware pottery and clay sculpture. In recent years, my work has gone in a new direction.
My current work is informed by the Japanese aestheticwabi sabi , which is complex but can be partially defined as rustic, unrefined beauty. I am attracted to this way of working because it seems to celebrate the nature of raw clay and emphasize the tactile qualities of the material used, which in this case is a red stoneware clay with heavy grog that I have used for years to build sculpture and am now finding very satisfying as a medium for these vessel forms and wall pieces. My approach is to utilize stiffened slab shapes that are joined with liberal amounts of slip, which is allowed to ooze out and form an irregular linear element. I also try to use the natural edges of the rolled slabs as much as possible as a balance against the cut edges. Borrowing a term from woodworking, I refer to those textured, somewhat randomly occurring slab borders as “live edges”. The finishing process I use is a mishima treatment, in which red iron oxide is brushed over all and then sponged off, creating a contrast of light and dark areas and emphasizing textures. On some pieces, I follow the sponging with some light sanding before firing the pieces to cone 6 oxidation.
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