Having the chance to write about my work, my thoughts drift to a recent piece of mine, About A Thousand Chickens, a.k.a. More meets The Eye.  It was an installation of about 1,000 chickens and 1 large sculpture in the Eve Drewlowe Gallery, Iowa City, Iowa.  Each chicken is about 12 inches high and various colors of the fired clay with the exception of their eyes.  Each eye is under-glazed white with mostly yellow irises and black pupils.  The single large sculpture has 1 light green oval space on its front.  The reason I made so many was a general intellectual curiosity in the studio where I created this piece.  I was often asked why, and I always returned the question, asking them what they thought the meaning was.
     I have come to understand my work is often misrepresented by others as one-dimensional, naïve, and unsophisticated.  This has to do with my reluctance to speak about my work without my own complete understanding.  My view of art is that it cannot be fully informed until an abundant amount of time has passed.  For example, a ceramic artist I met once told a story of his jar making.  He kept wiring down the lids.  He did not really understand why until several years later when he was revising his slide lecture.  He realized at the time he was making the jars, he was going through a divorce, and the tying down of the lids related to the feelings going on inside him.  I will often acknowledge I do not understand why I am making what I am.  I believe this is the correct way to go about making art.  This brings me to another story about a well known potter, Bernard Leach, told by Warren Mackenzie in a recent lecture given at The University of Iowa Museum of Art.  Warren was saying that Leach was an excellent artist as a draftsman but a terrible potter.  The reason for this statement was because Leach would spend hours drawing pots he wanted to make.  Then he would take the drawings and try to replicate them exactly in three dimensional forms.  The drawings were made as an artist, the pots were not.  And in turn the pots had lost all of their emotion, feeling, and soul that the drawings possessed.  This was in part because the drawings were not known as he was creating them.  The pots were already known in two dimensional forms, and the discovery was not present in the three dimensional pieces.  When I say I do not know what I am creating and why it is because this process of the unknown is what I adhere to when making art, both in conceptual and physical terms.  I also feel this dynamic of ‘learning while creating’ instead of ‘creating what is known’ spills over into how an audience interacts with an exhibited piece, both formally and informally.  This is what I like to think of as the audience’s opportunity to create; they create their understanding of the piece.  If I were to spell out to them what the piece is about, then they would be creating the known, instead of learning while creating.  I have always held the notion that the final piece is just as much about what the viewer discovers as it is about what the artist has. 
     There are recurring superficial traits in my work that About A Thousand Chickens, a.k.a. More meets The Eye exemplifies.  These are: allowing concept to coexist equally with the nature of my materials; bringing humor into serious topics, like a spoonful of sugar; and the process.  The process of ceramics has certain trends whether it is pottery, sculpture, slip casting, or production pottery.  For example, some of these trends are drying time, storage while drying, covering in plastic so as not to dry out too much, moving objects to the kiln, firing the kiln, unloading the objects from the kiln, making clay, and then the process of making.  In the process of making, one finds particular desirable aspects of a piece, like a bowl, which is pleasing to the maker.  What generally happens is the artist tries to recreate the bowl because the artist likes it so much.  There is a general rule of thumb, however, that the seasoned artist ought to realize but often forgets.  This rule is that you can’t recreate what you’ve already created, like Leach’s drawings of pots into his three dimensional pots.  What happens is the second bowl the artist tries to make in likeness of the first is not as good, so the artist makes a third.  Often, if the artist can let go a little of the idea of the first bowl, the third begins to take on a life of its own.  The artist sees this and tries to recreate the third bowl now.  The fourth again is not as good, but the fifth begins to show qualities of the first and third and also possess its own qualities, giving it life, making it art.  As bowl after bowl, or chicken after chicken,  is created, certain ones will be favored, and in turn the aspects that make them favorable will try to be recreated.  As the process goes on these favorable aspects become a given and new favorable aspects come to the table.  A quote I like to put to this process is: “The amateur keeps trying until it is done right, the professional keeps working until it can’t be done wrong”.  The main point being is that for the object to have life the artist needs to watch the object and not force preconceived ideals on it.  With the chickens, this particular process of creating has allowed the nature of the clay to show through and given the concept time to find its place.  Also, on a slight aside note in the topic of concept, is the more I explain these conceptual elements, the further I get from there meaning.  Like Leach making a pot from a drawing, my verbal explanation becomes a hollow shell of the truth, persuading me to take a Buddhist approach to my explanations. 
           My work has always had its roots in the dichotomy of one liners with understanding the space between.  Being complimented by the words my “work is honest and direct” I have come to the conclusion that using the vehicle of art as poetry compliments this honesty and directness.  The process of making this piece has made me laugh on more than one occasion.  Something I have always sought as an artist and as a person is to bring humor to other people.  In life I am often called an imp as well as possessing a dry sense of humor.  With my art I try to make people laugh while giving them a dose of reality.  If they choose to ignore or don’t understand the helping of my thoughts, I still feel I have succeeded if I can get them to smile.  In this way every chicken has a goofy smile.  Each kiln unloading usually had at least one snicker from me or a helper.