Patrick Dragon

The appeal of vessel form is its universality and simplicity. It is a neutral format in which artistic styles can take flight. The vessel’s basic elements – foot, wall, and rim – are inherently sculptural and impose few limits on the imagination. My wheel-thrown, thin-walled earthenware vessles are carved, hammered, and manipulated to create exterior shapes and patterns that contrast vibrantly with their smooth, empty interior volumes. Some exteriors are further enhanced with slip trailing or scrafitto.

My more sculpted vessels express the strong interactions I feel bewteen the bowl form and the sculptural elements. Many are burnished and covered with fine particles of decanted clay called terr sigillata and sagger-fired in wood, facilitating subtle color variations. In this process, exterior surfaces remain porous after each firing, allowing me, like the natural world from which these materials come, to slowly build up layers of clay and color. The vessel interiors are double glazed, creating richly contracsting colors and textures.

The open vessle forms I create become biomorphic objects expressing the patterns and shapes I observe and sense on the surface of the earth – the layers of rock, water, plants, and diverse life forms.