David.C.White

My ceramic work for the past 30 years has mainly focused on the area of stoneware pottery fired in oil or gas kilns. The work was to do with function, i.e. to cook with, to eat off or to drink from. Now I wish to draw attention to the demise of our natural world. Emphasis is now on the shapes and surfaces celebrating the dynamic flight of swifts and the hidden lives of fish in the sea.

To watch the beautiful silhouette of an acrobatic swift piercing the deep blue summer sky is a wonder of nature. It must have inspired our desire to fly. Yet this desire has progressed and seems to threaten that which inspired it. The sky is woven with the exhaust from aeroplanes and the number of swifts is declining.

Marilyn Williams

My work is thrown on a momentum wheel which I love because of its slow speed and quietness. I find throwing a very meditative experience. There is a moment of stillness when you center a pot which I feel through my whole body. And I feel that I am trying to convey that stillness and simplicity in my work.

Initially my first bird pots were influenced by a North American vessel that I had seen at the Horniman Museum and the decoration inspired by the plumage on the Great Northern Diver Bird. But over time my shapes have become more abstract and simplified. The symbolism of bird forms appears in many different cultures, symbols evoking the themes of immortality, renewal, rebirth, death, wisdom and insight. And I think because of these mythological and psychological elements, people respond to my work on an emotional and intuitive level.