It’s called Corral Dish, although I don’t mind someone calling it Coral Dish which has
been attributed to it, it seems to work both ways. It came out of the idea…that sometimes
you want to, on a table, contain something, that you don’t actually need to hold it
up and offer it, like a dish, a dish offers, a bowl holds, this corrals, instead of that.
I was teaching on the Harrow Studio Pottery course which was quite a traditional throwing
course. I was really interested in teaching on this course, it was about function, but
I was really questioning the functionality of thrown ware. And the then head of department
had a term for some of the products that came out of this course and he used to call them
a ‘bish’ which was a cross between a bowl and a dish, basically they were confused.
And I think that was at the back of my mind. Sometimes you want to put a banana and a bunch
of keys and just keep them in one place, so that was the functioning reason about that.
But once I started making it, it became a landscape. I grew up in Cumbria and as a teenager
I did a lot of rock climbing and so that’s probably an influence. These scalloped pieces
which are very like the frilly ends of Victoriana…the way you cover the piano’s legs, that’s
the way I’d describe it. It’s a frill.
It’s constructed out of bits. It’s a bit like a toy kit. This is obviously very heavily
textured. In my studio I’d have a series of slabs of plaster with this texture on,
which the clay was then pressed on to. And the textures came from various sources. This
one is crumpled up Bacofoil and then cast in plaster. There was another one that I used
which was tripe which was really beautiful, very beautiful. The glazes are simple but
complex. Complex in the way that they would be, one glaze is placed over another glaze,
it’s similar to the effect of glazing in painting, that you paint tinted glazes one
over the other. They fire and they melt in … technically it’s called a nucleation,
I think. They separate out and the glaze becomes the texture itself. There’s probably three
or four glazes on this and it would be fired quite a few times as well … to build up
that glaze colour. Someone once said that I understood artificial light, which was a
nice compliment and I see these in an artificial light. This is a part of the reaction to the
Leach movement of naturalism, of glazes looking natural. I just don’t get it.