Articles
A Thought - Ceramic Review Issue 245, September/October 2010
Recently exploring the Pitt Rivers Museum, among the leg-bone flooring, shrunken heads, seal-gut parkas, medicinal/magic objects, and other open-ended varieties of paraphernalia we gather around us to help us cope with, or keep at bay, the less controllable aspects of life, along with objects in one of the sympathetic magic drawers, out slid the consideration of why people collect pots like those at an exhibition I had just attended as a participant.
Getting it Right - Ceramic Review Issue 192, November/December 2001
Two years ago at Earth and Fire, Rufford I had a stall. Minding my business in the vaguely disinterested way one does in order to give space for people to nose about feeling unpreyed upon, I registered a woman and a man, a couple, aggressively disagreeing sotto voce about my pots. "...I do think they're lovely", she said. "They're awful", he hissed back, small bowl in hand, "look..."
Charles Bound - The Human Form in Clay by Jane Waller
The workings of this artist are bold statements, tightly formed but freely handled, so that when you know that Charles Bound has his studio on a farm in Yorkshire, where he is close to things that matter, the rough texture and vitrified rocky appearance begin to make sense - for their ruggedness connects them direct to the earth. It is a great pleasure to have found this artist for the book. I was introduced to his work by Tony Birks-Hay at the Alpha Gallery in Sherborne and saw that its forthright strength and unfettered sensibility was dominant.
Wood Firing
The pots began to have gradations of surface, depth, and colour where the flame slipped off them on its way along the kiln. Stuff out of the wood began to stick to the pots in varying degrees of melt, giving rough, smooth, matt, shiny surfaces, often in quite small areas. The differential heat from upstream to downstream altered the shapes of some pots, moved others to stick against each other or make shadows on the pots' sides where they blocked the flame's flow. There began from this process of more than heat and atmosphere to be a suggestion away from pots toward fired clay, bits of earth, pieces and lumps going through the firing.
Letting Go - Ceramic Review Vol 155, 1995
The sun is low on the Yorkshire hilltop and streams in under the vast farm shed roof. There is surprising quiet as the precut bundles of slabwood from the local saw mill are separated into individual pieces and fed into the fireboxes at the front and at the midway point along the side of this reclining beast of a kiln. There is a regular cycle of charging the fire, watching the pyrometer drop while the kiln seems to gather itself up under the pressure of unburnt gases, then smoke followed by flame erupts from every opening and reaches into the sky from the 18foot chimney. The pyrometer climbs again but seems to resist reaching much beyond its previous high.
