Influences and Approach

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.

I move within an alchemic stew of memory, intuition, craft discipline, and wild-eyed experimentation.

Influences

All of this is the sedimented result of years spent chasing—and being chased by—an unruly constellation 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 occasionally write.

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.