Influences and Approach

From my Normandy atelier, I make ceramics that invite both use and speculation. Whether reliquary, vessel, chawan, or imagined artifact, my forms pair material precision with a sustained interest in silence, ambiguity, and deep time. What emerges from this work is often less an object than a provocation: a thing that appears to have slipped from some uncertain stratum of the world, asking you to consider it without telling you how.

All of this feels like the sedimented result of years spent chasing—and being chased by—an unruly pack of influences.

First, this: decades ago, as an early medieval historian and archaeologist, I wrote an entire dissertation on inhumation accessory vessels. Yes, pots buried with dead people. I made some wild-eyed claims, some actually backed by something resembling science. Let me know if you’d like to be the fourth person in the whole world to read it. So, pots and I go way, way back.

But—aside from the contents and circumstances of late Roman, Anglo-Saxon, and Carolingian burials—I’ve been particularly shaped by my long to-and-fro with the Paleolithic and Neolithic and their incomprehensible productions; the calligraphy and painting from the Muromachi through the Edo periods in Japan; the poetry of the Tang dynasty in China, that later of Bashō, Ryōkan, and Ikkyū in Japan, and even later that of Jim Harrison and Ada Limón in the US; the pre-cruciform churches of Anglo-Saxon England; the interior excesses of the late Renaissance and immediately afterwards; the shadows of Junichirō Tanizaki and Caravaggio; the transcendence of Bach, Mozart, Satie, and Chopin (and more than a little Wagner); the polychromic wordshards of Borges; and an ever-expanding ecology of extraordinarily creative ceramicists, musicians, architects, sculptors, painters, poets, and writers that make the contemporary such an interesting and exciting place within which to live.

After years elsewhere, I now live in very rural France, where I also garden, cook, and try valiantly (although largely unsuccessfully) to convince my Tbilisi-born cat that just because we’re surrounded by small chirpy squeaky things, she doesn’t need to bring them all into the house.

As a former member of a number of corporate boards, professional societies, various cliques, and mysterious brotherhoods, I now only affiliate as a membre, Collège 3, Institut pour les Savoir-Faire Français (anciennement L’Institut National des Métiers d’Art), and membre, the Chambre de Métiers et de l’Artisanat Normandie, which seems after all, absolutely sufficient.