so much to do, in so many different directions, but I am getting through it. one of them was to photograph the new pots properly, and to do that I had to finish tidying the bases where some still had debris stuck and also take off the chunk of pot from the back of one of them, using my dremel drill. this is the makeshift studio – basically two soft boxes on neon lamps, and a black-to-grey vinyll backdrop pegged to a ply board propped against my stool on my worktable. there’s a lot of ambient light too, as this is right underneath a very generous skylight and next to double doors which are fully glazed.

I use a small camera, a lumix DCM camera which is a point and shoot, and gives me a much better quality photo than my old SLR which I got rid of. I don’t use a tripod, because I don’t have the patience to keep resetting up – I need the flexibility of just waving myself around in front of the pot to find the best point of view.

so I got some nice dramatic full views

like these

but some interesting (I hope) close-ups

which I want to counterpose

with all the other things that are whirling around in my head at the moment

as I feel it is all interconnected

in ways which are very important to me

perhaps in ways which I can’t put into words that well

and that fit together visually better

trees, leaves, earth, clay, wood-fired pots,

leaf prints;

all these shapes and textures

and colours

the sky, the air, the light, the whole

experience of being in this place

and looking, sometimes in ways as focused as my lurcher scanning the landscape for prey.

the ash from hard woods that Nic threw into the kiln and that streamed like molten lava down the shoulders of my pieces, and the shells that were pressed between pots, and the plough lines that I combed into this bottle’s shoulder, combining to make new things

leaves

soft fractal shapes

and landscape lines that bend according to where you are