I am hopelessly ambivalent, so I find it deeply reassuring that functional and symbolic ceramics appear simultaneously in the prehistoric record. Somehow, that seems to justify my own meandering back and forth between teacups and sculpture. Working in clay is for me a kind of lucid dreaming. Freud maintained that the most important requirement for dream imagery is that it put complex ideas and feelings into imagistic form, but that the underlying purpose of dreaming is pleasure. Making things does bring me enormous pleasure and allows me to put my own ideas into sensuous form. But my final purpose is that the teacups and sculpture give pleasure to those who use or look at them.

fwshackelford@claygallery.org