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These drawings
began as works on paper -- line drawings, black ink on white pages,
in books, journals, and on scraps passing through. Until finding
their current homes on Michael's pots, I considered these lines
homeless and hidden. I had no idea how to bring them out of the
confines of personal notebooks and boxes of paper fragments, the
places where they tended to lurk unseen and impatient. Michael and
I realized shortly after meeting and seeing each other's work the
potential for a powerful marriage of my lines and his forms. Michael's
pots had a beautiful simplicity and solidity that promised to ground
the scratchy tilting quality of the drawings without hindering the
movement of the lines. We experimented with a few techniques before
settling on the one that allowed the drawings to fully connect with
the ceramic shapes. By carving into the porcelain and inlaying black
slip into the incised drawings, I was able to achieve a wider variety
of line quality than I had previously working with pen and paper.
By using this technique and then firing the pieces in a salt kiln,
the drawings developed their own unique atmospheres on the pots
themselves, sometimes crisp and shiny, other times fogged and waxy.
Because of the distortion inherent in the method of firing we used,
I had to reckon with the relative distortion of the images and let
go of the control of drawing pen lines on paper. In the end, I found
the ways in which the firing transformed the drawings from marks
on the pieces' exteriors into integral parts of Michael's forms
to be the ultimate expression of our collaboration.
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