I know that clay is an inanimate material... it has no ideas, thoughts nor feelings...even so, it feels like it speaks to me. Of all the materials I've worked with, it is the most sensual, the one that responds most when I touch it..it seems to hold me when I caress it. The dialogue I have with each handful I meet is different, just as with each person..it depends on where it comes from, the moment we meet, how I feel and where I am when we meet. Once our shared experience ends I am surprised to see "who" I was relating to.

 

The pieces you see here come from Alhaurín de la Torre.I haven't lived here for long so I am still in the process of integrating into this landscape as the landscape integrates into me. I know there are great gashes in the side of the mountain...white rock quarries. I know, but I'm not always aware. White rocks poke through the earth in my garden, the same mountain, the same rock, the same rocks who showed themselves through the white clay I came upon.

From the black clay hinted faces appear...what do they remind me of ? the walls of the Cueva de la Pileta with it's cave paintings or the ghostly faces that spontaneously appeared on the hearth of a house in Bélmez..so mysterious..who painted them? where are they? who are they?

Clay holds improbable forms; it is docile or stubborn or tremendously fragile, just like me.

Not long ago I worked with clay in wet, dark, green, forest covered places with thick mosses and lichens covering the ground, the rocks, the tree roots, everything...during my travels in the USA.Our conversations produced fine, thin, fragile organic forms who ask to be protected. I am amazed to see how different these pieces are, inevitably site specific.

What are these "things" I present for your observation? Are they "pots"? Can they be used for anything? I suppose they could. They can be used the same way a rock, a tree trunk or a shell can...or not.

A friend coined the name "table sculptures" so that's what I'll call them too. They are abstract forms with an inside and an outside with no meaning other than their own existence, coming from the earth, wearing the colors of the earth