The experience of working with clay for a living, as with most mixed blessings, is a confounding one. Like most professions, it requires a necessary dedication, some discipline, organizational skills, a continuing education, an opportunity for interdisciplinary learning, and hard work. Unlike most jobs, it can also give the good feeling of self-employment, maybe a certain amount of recognition, the heady feeling of going against machined mass-production, and the satisfying feeling of beginning, carrying through, and completing a project.

And it offers deadlines, periodically inferior supplies, over-fired kilns, poor photo processing, work destroyed in shipping, galleries that suddenly fold, dried-up creative juices, the prospect of poverty.

But it also offers the intangible, and herein must lie the reasons one stays with clay. The intangible: of creating "something" out of "nothing"; of working at a chosen pace for interested people; of a connection, conscious or otherwise, with a past, a history so rich and varied - and so essential and human; of bringing into the world an object that intentionally exists to affect other people, maybe calmly, maybe outrageously; and perhaps most significantly, of that rare but sometime moment when the pot (of sculpture or object or idea) works, when the sum is greater than the parts, and something wonderful has happened.

Silhouette and form, with a quiet contained presence, have always been my major concerns. My most current work reflects this on-going fascination with form, and an increased exploration of greater depth and subtlety in the surface, with new directions in color, scale and texture. I continue to use the vessel as my point of departure, enjoying the historical connection. But more and more, it is what I do to the piece after it comes from the kiln - air brushing, specifically applied combustibles, controlled water and air-quenching - that dominates my thinking.

I often think I make pots to slow down the world; and maybe to experience the sensual/tactile quality of wet clay on the wheel; and maybe to better understand life's dichotomies and paradoxes by studying clay's dichotomies and paradoxes; and maybe just because I have to.

- Bob Smith