Inspiration is found in the natural world around my rural home. Small sculptures are intricatly carved, portraying insects, frogs and other creatures in their environment. These pieces point out the importance of life in the little things of nature that most of us tend to not notice during our busy lives. With them I hope to arouse quiet memories in the mind of the viewer.
A carving style evolved during my 25 years of working with clay. The early carvings were made using my stoneware pots and tiles to carve on. As interest in carving grew, I strove to include more detail while using shallow relief carving techniques. A style developed that involved layered images carved from the damp clay surface of porcelain boxes. The layers intermingled foreground, middle ground and background imagery. A favorite, complex, subject grouping dealt with what occurs around water: above, at, below, and reflected from the surface of the water.
Tools which I made from bamboo were used to remove small amounts of clay while sculpting the shallow relief design. Celadon or pale blue glazes enhanced the shallow carvings, softening the presentation and adding a feeling of depth to the composition. When frogs and toads became more three-dimensional, the more delicate shallow relief carving on the boxes was compromised. A separate, more sculptural porcelain carving style emerged, as an exploration of miniature sculpture in the forms of netsuke and ojime.
For the next five years, I wrestled privately with aesthetic arguments over the limited possibilities that the use of porcelain offered the sculptures. Whether pieces were glazed or unglazed, I unhappily found no resolve while I remained with clay as the carving material. In the early summer of 1995, I took up a piece of boxwood and carved my first wood netsuke, ending a twenty five year affair with clay.
The carved porcelain pieces presented for sale on the following pages are a limited collection from my reserve.
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