This work represents most truthfully my relationship to clay and woodfiring. It is the culmination of years of moving literally tons of clay – throwing it on the floor, stretching it, wedging it, cutting it and watching the interesting things that happen to it as pure process – while observing how it interacts with its space and the ground, as well as how woodfiring effects the surfaces of the work. The totality of each individual piece provides feedback for the next.

I made more and more use of this immediate and direct use of the clay to build the first Construct piece about 1987, a time that I gave up functional wheel thrown work for a while. Working with the vessel form I let more of this pure clay effect come though, finding the vessel itself to be confining. In trying to get at capturing the moment in the unfired clay, much as woodfiring captures a memory of the firing, I was lead to complete abstraction.

My viewers found this to be too much and I spent a while working back into more traditional figurative sculpture to prove something about my ability to myself. Eventually I realized that this going backwards, while visually more accessible, was not going to help me promote the moment in my work.

In 1999, while working on the pedestal of a commission piece, I found a form that would tell this story. The form of the pedestal could be viewed as a vessel and only needed a lid to complete the work. This was a compromise I was willing to make. Nothing about the process had changed, only the way it could be seen. On one level it could be seen as a jar with a lid, yet it also addresses that underlying record of the moment, time and innovative process, this thing I call the universal.