The Development of My Personalized Aesthetic Perspective (page 1/4) As an object maker, I consider myself to be a potter rather than a ceramist. My work exists as two distinct but related bodies of work. I make both functional porcelain dinnerware, primarily for private commission and a separate body of ceramic work that I consider sculpture. The sculpture pieces are situational in that I formally arrange collections of ceramic forms on trays or large platters. They are related to my travel and are memories of places that I have visited, the time of day, the light and color relationships contained in those memories. I began my post undergraduate experience as an apprentice at the Byron Temple Pottery in the United States. Byron was an apprentice of Bernard Leach, and although I was not a direct apprentice of the Leach Pottery, I am a direct descendent of that tradition. Most of the form vocabulary that I use emanates from that formative experience. From Byron Temple I inherited an affinity for the material and a passion for making functional objects. With his guidance, I learned how to be a craftsman. I later attended Cranbrook Academy of Art where I studied with Professor Richard DeVore. At Cranbrook, I concentrated on making porcelain dinnerware. It was under Professor DeVore’s guidance that I began to find my personal voice, and learned to be an artist, making functional objects intended to serve the Western Style human dining ritual. The dilemma presented was how to solve the problem of making objects with forms that had been made for thousands of years, could reference the whole of ceramic history, yet stand on their own to communicate abstractly the sense of time, place, spirit, character and feelings of the maker simultaneously. In other words, how to be contemporary. My journey through life as a maker has been formed by the realization and acceptance of the principle of this guiding dilemma. From such composers as Laura Nyro, I learned to understand the concept of melody, interval, rhythm, cadence, beat, meter and measure, consonance, dissonance, variation, improvisation, dynamic and time as conveyed through music.