Here is an extract from "Abstract Reflection", an article I wrote for the December, 2009 issue of Pottery Making Illustrated.
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My Current surface work comes from the desire to use my pots as a space to abstractly render elements of my life, observations, and reflections. I’m interested in breaking up the surface of the form and creating spaces within and upon the object. The division of space through line and color provide symbolic opportunities to explore paradoxical states of interior and exterior, expansiveness and constriction, possibility and unattainability, connections and misconnections. Essentially the surface of a pot is a place where the inward and the outward meet, a means of finding connections through our shared interior worlds.

I prefer terra sigillata to glaze for its soft and non-reflective surface. I want to keep the surface in a raw state – as close as possible in appearance to unfired clay – for me that’s when the clay is most vibrant, when it most resembles skin and our bodies.

…Although I make a lot of decisions as I am working, I do think of the relationship of the red dots and the corresponding line work, that being the central part of the surface design, and that which the rest revolves around. I will consider the condition and position of the red dots – is there a tension between them? How will the lines move over the form? Will they connect on one side and disconnect on the other? Will it be an isolated dot? Or a cluster?

I view different sides of a form as passages of time or spaces of transition, using color and line to establish the division or movement…