Monuments

Abstract

My work with pottery as subject matter has led me to become involved with placing pots in visual, historical, and architectural contexts. The tall, slender stacks of pottery forms put pots into an architectural context by implication. The work refers to towers, columns, pilasters. By most ceramic standards, these towers are quite large, stacking to heights between six and twelve feet. The significance of scale and the emphasis of repetition make this work a monument to pottery. The repetition of forms within each column encourages manipulation of the perception of those forms. The pot forms may be individually examined, compound forms created by the interact ion of parts of two or more units may be discovered, and the silhouette of the combined forms may be read as a single shape. Some of the compound forms were deliberately pursued. I searched for a vase shape that when repeated yielded a compound form like the body of a violin . Many of the towers are banded with colored slips and glazes. The stripes are an articulate way to describe the real or iIlusionistic volume of the forms without unduly distracting at tent ion from those forms. These horizontal bands also assist in further segmentation of the columns. The stripes are stacked, too. The color of the bands may be used to stress different ways of perceiving the units which compose the columns, Or facilitate blending those units into one flowing shape. For me, color has content. Some surfaces refer to water, or a certain quality of light.