Peter Callas
Vessel

Material: Shigaraki clay

Artist Statement

The creative side of artistry is an evolution of expanding the possibilities of art through imagination, experimentation, technology, and intelligence.

For over five decades I have focused on this as a potential to incite the mind toward something beyond the technical aspects of making art, beyond the mechanical task of creating physical forms – even in material as ponderous as clay.

Nature’s surfaces are the constant touchstone and catalyst serving my artistic vision with deliberation and a carefully cultivated receptiveness to the capabilities and caprices of clay.

​The Anagama kiln, used to fire my work, serves as a tool for the intangible quality of spirit and energy. The centerpiece for experimentation that records the passage of time as effectively as the accumulated strata in a cross-section of earth. Its ability to conjure in simple, rustic form the material transformations associated with time and the natural forces that return all things to their origins in the earth.

An aficionado of archaeology, To this day I remain enamored of the unpredictable and often curiously emotive effects that long burial can work on the surfaces of ceramic objects.

A kinship for over 50 years melding with the features of nature, especially those that reflect the transformations inherent in botanical and geological cycles. Earthquakes and volcanic eruptions are only the most obvious and impressive symptoms that I reference…. the subtly of a dialogue with the material above any physically aggressive execution of form.

Though my vessels and sculptures may sometimes seem to reflect inexorable force as inevitably as tree trunks blasted by lightning or boulders broken from the face of a mountain. The more profound, abstract content of the work is always inscribed in the quieter details.

A sustained activity has not by itself opened the portals of the absolute; the discourse between artist and clay has not evolved as an isolated and autonomous dialectic but rather as an exchange nuanced by continual recourse to nature as a revelatory source in the pursuit of the eternal and universal.

I strive to neither imitate the face of nature nor attempt the infinitely more difficult task of becoming nature; rather, I allow the experience of nature to continually enhance my receptiveness to certain patterns, rhythms, and transformations in which the intuition recognizes the eternal and universal.