Beauty, and our response to it, remains a mystery. But it seems to me that, in the alchemy of making, the pot becomes subtly humanized. It is as though a kind of knowing is translated - through care and consideration, and an intimate connecting with the stuff under our fingers, the fluidity, the resistance, the wetness, the toughness - into a form with an independent life. With its own power to move.

So we speak of pots as though they are animate: we call them gentle or generous or strong or vulnerable. A group of bottles becomes a family. A straggling line of jugs and cups and tumblers becomes an assorted tribe journeying somewhere. A silent line of porcelain beakers waits in a window for the light to hit their rims and for their ordinary beauty to become radiant.

Copyright: Gwyn Hanssen Pigott Reproduced in part from Objects of Ideas: Ten Approaches to Contemporary Craft Practise, Crafts Council of Queensland, 1996. By permission of the artist.