The most complicated outcomes have been the two plates that catastrophically failed in the kiln. I was just rushing the firing process and the plates hadn’t thoroughly dried through, evidently. They were two good plates I had made on a Friday afternoon in the art room, after school mainly, one of which experimented with symmetry, almost. To make it worse I printed out a couple of good photographs with the intention of possibly considering a replica and when I showed people they said, ‘wow, they were great’ which just made me feel worse.

It does bring them into the category of Lost Artwork along with all of the others, known and unknown. I mourn them but haven’t got round to replicating them. I could do. The photos are clear and I could and then they would be in the category of replica art works, known and unknown. I like that idea but things have moved on, I have cast new moulds, found new things in the cupboard to press into the clay and so on. Latest thing is a woodcut from the Far East found at the back of a cupboard. This has been fun with slip painted on it and banged into the clay, sprinkled with oxide.

What made the getting out of the broken plates with a brush and dustpan more painful was that I had made three plates which were supposed to look as if they were toying with destruction or their own demise. Sprinkled with raw oxides and dripped with poured slips and so on. These were supposed to look like they were close to falling apart but obviously not fall apart. These were responding to seeing some work in the Halesworth Gallery that uses artfully placed raw materials by Kyle Kirkpatrick, a concert of a late Beethoven quartet at Snape and the news of a family bereavement.

I haven’t fired these yet. I have got anxious about firing and I am leaving the plates a lot longer to dry out. There are fourteen raw plates waiting for a biscuit fire. Mostly sprig based accumulations, termed Art Room Excavations. Thats what they are based on; finding things around the classroom and in the cupboards and pressing it onto plates. They are supposed to look archeological objects.