I’ve always enjoyed experimenting with form, extending it to extremes, adding elements, extracting parts, texturing and decorating surfaces, etc. Included here are a few of the various one-of-a-kind pieces I made while attempting to create something different and interesting.

In the mid 1980s I began showing my work at a new gallery in Calgary called Culpepper. They were receptive to exploratory work, so I felt free to experiment with my contributions to a their group exhibitions.

Included in one of those exhibitions were the blue ‘winged vessels‘. A ceramist from Taiwan happened to be visiting at the time and he selected two of my pieces, ‘twig basket’ and ‘winged vase’, to enter into the Taipei Fine Arts Museum’s International Ceramics Exhibition. The two pieces were juried in and accepted into their permanent collection.

I also held a solo exhibition of sculptural pottery at Culpepper, featuring pots with spikes and lilac twigs.

Salt firing. In 1994 and ’95, I attended a couple of ‘salt’ workshops at Red Deer College. Salt, when injected into a kiln at mature temperature, becomes a volatile gas that spreads through the kiln and glaze-coats every surface, not just the pottery in the kiln, but also the shelves they’re sitting on and the interior kiln walls. It requires a special hard-brick kiln, which I didn’t have. But I found the experience interesting and managed to get a few salt-fired pots out of it, as shown below.