I suppose I’m happiest when I’m trying something new.  It’s one of the reasons I choose hand-building over throwing.  I deeply admire the throwers who internalise a form through repetition until it becomes as natural as a signature.  The meditative nature of that process really appeals, but repetition doesn’t came naturally to me.  The question “what if?” does.

What if I expand a pot from the inside, how would it look?  What if I wrap it in vegetation first?  And the other day, what if I roll the pot on the bench top as I expand it?

So my questions are not, “what if I made a pot that looked like this?”, and more “what if I do this; what will the pot look like?” So in some ways the work is more a result of curiosity than imagination.

This week I asked the rolling on a bench question and the answers are interesting.  It produces conical surfaces which can interact, creating shapes that would be hard to conceive in advance.  And once rolling was in my head I tried a rubber ink roller held vertically which accentuated the boundary between the cones and gave some lovely crisp lines to contrast with the curves.