What has brought me back to the studio year after year, what keeps me curious and excited is the inherently contradictory nature of clay. I have found living and working in the space between clay's opposites to be a challenge that continues to motivate me. Clay is cool and moist yet requires the fiery heat of the kiln. It's soft and malleable yet rigid and brittle. Clay is inert and organic, a mixture of silicas and aluminas, yet it's also in some ways alive and unpredictable, Clay is crude, ancient, even prehistoric, but it's also refined and modern. It's a medium for the functional and the frivolous, for the utilitarian and sumptuous, for the classical and the avant-garde. The most important inspirations for my work have been the shapes and surfaces of nature and the forms of classical pottery. Currently I work in porcelain but employ two divergent processes; I take two different paths from the same starting point, wheel-thrown processes; I take two different paths from the same point, wheel-thrown porcelain, to a arrive at different but complimentary destinations. Some of my work is in white porcelain with a clear glaze and fired in the very controlled environment of an electric kiln. These are pierced, cut, and embossed in a painstaking and methodical fashion to achieve the organic effect I desire. The rest of the work is Raku-fired porcelain. This work is not heavily altered; instead I let the inherently organic and unpredictable Raku process achieve the desired result. My work featured on the cover of New Hampshire Magazine