My love of clay goes back to the first grade and my first clay project, a sombrero ashtray. What I remember most is the smell of the damp clay and the tactile pleasure of wetting the piece to keep the clay soft while I worked. I loved the feel of it -- the slippery surface contrasting with the solidity of the underlying form. As I wrapped the piece with a damp cloth and then plastic to put it away, I wondered how I could wait an interminable week to work on it again. The finished piece was a shiny glazed wonder to me. Over the many years that it resided on the breakfast room shelf, I delighted in handling it and feeling its bulges and concavities.

In my three-dimensional art class in high school, I learned various hand-building techniques such as pinch pot forming and slab and coil building. I loved the technical challenges and still have my notes from that class. A pair of slab-built mugs I made that year are still displayed as my parents' home. To me they remain handsome in terms of proportion, surface texture and glaze color.

In college my interest moved from making nonfunctional pieces such as sealed box shapes. I mounted some of these six-sided boxes on the wall, with design elements on their faces only. Eventually, I eliminated the five plain sides, leaving a flat piece of clay on the wall. Some of the pieces had irregular edges; others were geometric.

The work I've been doing for the past twelve years evolved from these earlier wall sculptures. I arrange parallelogram-shaped tiles into architectural compositions that have a trompe l'oeil illusion of three-dimensional form.

Process: After I roll out large slabs of clay, I texture them with found objects, including pieces of hardware and even such items as a printed circuit board, a Ping Pong paddle, a chrome "Kamback" from an old Chevrolet -- the possibilities are endless. Then, when I cut the slabs into tiles, no two have the same textural designs. After the tiles are bisque-fired, I lay them out on the glaze table in the composition that will be their final shape. I copy my glaze design with pencil onto the tiles from sketches I have made earlier. The impressions in the tiles create a rich underlay for the glaze design.

After I apply the glazes, I fire the tiles in a small raku kiln, four tiles per batch, until the glazes are melted. Then with tongs I transfer the red-hot tiles into a lidded metal container. Before closing the lid, I strew the tiles with pine needles to start the smoking process. The smoldering pine needles create a reduction atmosphere that pulls oxygen out of the tiles, resulting in vibrant lustres, crackled glazes and velvety, smoke-blackened clay.

Raku firing, which has its roots in Japan, is a time-intensive process, but the excitement that comes in seeing four finished tiles every twenty minutes compensates for this demanding firing method.

To finish a piece, I mount the glazed tiles on acrylic backings, complete with hanging hardware. My final step is to lacquer the tiles to preserve the light-sensitive lustre glazes.

My work hangs in private and corporate collections worldwide.
Phyllis Pacin