Trying and trying again. I can’t think of a better way to define my work than quoting what Franz Schubert once said: “I just finish one piece and begin the next”.
I don’t have any idea of what inspiration is; in any case not something I care much for. I believe in work, in the unavoidable need an artist faces to make something, very specific but ultimately impossible to understand fully. A sort of fate more than a decision or a choice.
For me it is clay. Into this relation with clay should go somehow everything I care for: poetry, literature in general, music (from Monteverdi to our days), geometry, knots, maps, astronomical charts, curved mirrors, crystals, languages, the work of hundreds of artists (some ceramists among them), labyrinths, the game of chess, seeds, sea shells and a long etcetera that would take pages to list and would certainly leave aside many things, probably the most important ones.
Our memory preserves every single experience and processes it in an unconscious way to produce what one can make. Not what one wants but only what one can make. In this impulse towards the Ithaca one would like to reach lies for me the secret of creativity: trying endlessly to express in a clearer way what I want to express.
After forty years of working with clay, after the thousands of pieces thrown and treated in the so many different ways I have discovered and tried to develop along the years, I realize now how this last year has been a time of recapitulation, a time to concentrate all that I have developed, trying to get to the most essential. And this means, as usual, starting with a thrown form; finishing a piece and beginning with the next.
And I would only like to add that it is a pleasure to share again the space of Puls Gallery with Ann van Hoey, an artist that I respect and admire, and whose work makes me think of an approach quite similar to mine regarding the creative process: systematic, analytical and precise.