Rachel

"It may seem that my art is about caricature, comedy and animals. Though I begin there, what I'm really interested in doing is using form to create gesture and then in working on the surface to enhance the form and gesture.

It takes some people longer than others to hear their inner voice and follow what it says. I finally listened to mine, and a few years ago put aside other things I'd been doing (teaching art and English, principally), and threw myself into clay work.

As far as influences go, the most important direct influence on my way of working with clay is the artist Roberta Laidman. From her I learned methods of working with soft slabs, which she learned from European artists, especially Dutch contemporary ceramic sculptors. Like hers and theirs, my forms are hollow, and the skeleton, such as it is, comes from the inside first, and then from the outside. From Roberta I also found dogs could be my subject matter. I think of them as characters who express emotional responses to a world they never made Like some people sometimes.

My approach to form is improvisational. I begin with a notion of what I intend to do, but the slab of clay, its character, the accidental marks on it, the texture and shape of it, have their considerable influence on that notion as I assemble pieces to make a form that emphasizes a gesture.

I love marks. Part of me is crazy about graphics, about lines, especially accidental and spontaneous ones. So my approach to the surface or the raw day is a result of that. Looking at my pieces one can see places where the tools have bit into a surface, where the clay has been stretched and stressed, where separate slabs have been stitched together. I hate to smooth those out, and leave them as long as I possibly can, until I decide the form can do without them. My more recent pieces have become cleaner and less baroque, I think. But taking away part of the story of the process that marks in clay tell feels painful but necessary to me flow.

The last phase--the application of glazes, stains and enqobes as a "skin" over the clay form--I approach in a painterly manner. I think of the form as a canvas. It even has the tooth and texture of the canvas that I rolled the slabs out on. Working in color layers, from light to dark, and generally from thin to thick, I try to emphasize the qualities of the volumes. I may add layers and fire a piece from five to ten times before I quit.

Cartoons are what my work makes people think of. But I like to remember that cartoon was the name for the drawings from which Renaissance painters worked. And I try to create pieces whose form and surface are complex enough that they will continue to interest and to give pleasure as one's acquaintance with them lengthens."