Like a lot of people I split my time now between the digital world and the physical one. I had filled with all this amazing stuff I see online and yet I also need the messiness of the clay and the materiality of it to feed me on some fundamental level. I remember going outside on a freezing cold winter night when I was at the Archibray almost 20 years ago. I looked up at the stars and remember thinking that it was the cold that made me feel alive in part of this world. It wasn't just seeing the vastness of the sky. It was a sensation of touch, the cold air on my skin. I think the importance of touch gets lost sometimes in the digital world because it's all about the visuals now. Being cold or being uncomfortable makes you aware of your physical self. I don't think we necessarily need to be uncomfortable to be aware. Awareness can come in different ways and clay is one shortcut to this kind of awareness because it makes you remember being human and being vulnerable. That's a lot of what my work is about. There's a meditative quality to all this repetition we do is potter. It requires being completely present in order to make work. You think that this kind of repeat would make you spacey and not pay attention but it's the opposite where things become focused and you notice all the tiny details like a scrap of clay hanging on or cracks are going to develop. This is the kind of work that holds my ability to see each pot as an individual and it's a different level of quality control than what happens on an assembly line because certain pots take on personality. It's like, oh that's the one with a snaggle tooth or oh that's the one with a pimple on it's handle. Plays a huge part of my work in making pots and drawing and taking pictures and in thinking about how I get work out into the world. There's this incredible sensuality to clay that I hope will be able to do. The thing that photography and ceramics have in common is their ability to preserve the clay. I love the cycle of ceramics. That clay is basically decomposed rocky and in the studio we record the saponte Reagan to the heat and work. a rock again and last forever. That lovely moment of play is frozen in time. Most of my work is fairly graphic so it reads well online, but my white decal pots are different. Actually they're pretty much the opposite. They're invisible unless you're up close. And then even when you're up close they're still impossible to read unless you handle a pot. Turning the pot lets the light catch the opalescent drawing. The colors can't exactly compete with our culture's addiction now to cell phones. And I don't think we should, but I think it's part of the dialogue when we're talking about making handheld objects. So what makes these pots unusual is that touch and holding them is integral to understanding what they are. There aren't any shortcuts to that. And this brings us back to the notion of being present. I think of them as slow pots because slowing down allows us to notice things. So when I take pictures I say here look at these beautiful things in life. And when I make pots I pay attention to all the tiny beautiful details that make a pot what it is. The way my tool furrows through the clay or mash is an edge or how a hand open me up to hold a finger. All these things matter because then when I also put a white drawing on a white surface that's very subtle. I'm asking the user to work harder to meet me halfway and to be present in that moment.