The Story in the Surface: What Texture and Colour Can Teach Us
The Surface as Mirror: In the quiet of my studio, clay doesn't respond in words but in form with surfaces that may draw out the flush of a soft wash, the stretch of a cut edge, or the deliberate surge of a ridge against a leading finger. Surface is not merely ornament; it's tone, mood, and unspoken feeling brought into material.
Surface and colour ceramics are intended not only to beautify, but as a discipline of deeper meaning as a means of psychological and emotional expression. The surface is where my inner life and the living clay accommodate to the reality of what is important today. Every gesture leaves its trace. Every texture is an imprint of thought or feeling that exists long after the work leaves my hands.
I wonder a lot about how someone's going to read a sculpture. Seeing a sculpture or a vessel, something typically happens in us often before we can pin down what it is. The surface of the clay does this: it contains more than we can say.
The Texture of Language: Texture fascinated me years before I understood form or narrative architecture. I remember early experiments with porcelain slip, gouging into it before it hardened, having no idea whether those marks would hold their edge or be erased in with later touches or in the fire. They left behind scars, ridges, dissipated canyons of memory carved into solidity.
Raw marks, gouges, and ridged finger trails erased with more life than smooth perfection. These were spaces where I could be raw, conflicted, and vulnerable. A mistake of the tool was a line of feeling. A rough spot felt like telling the truth.
Artists instinctively know that texture is not a surface adornment but a means of carrying the artist's inner life. A textured surface demands presence. It invites the eye and the hand closer. It invites the viewer to linger. To touch. Tactile depth is not a figure of speech; it is a living, felt thing. A tension in a roughened groove hides. A chipped edge suggests wear or history of use. Like in Japanese wabi-sabi philosophy, where it’s a focus on accepting flaw and impermanence, surfaces "express emotion and thought" and they communicate without words.
Colour as Emotional Register: I then began to add colour to my textures, not so much to make them simply beautiful but to enable them to have more emotional substance. Colour for me is never something that rests lightly on the surface; it seeps, clings to fissures, adheres to roughness. My colours live in underglazes, oxides, and stains that permeate fissures and scores.
Green always talks of stillness and rebirth like the gentle breathing of a forest floor. Oranges and iron oxides have been my mediums to elicit warmth, stamina, and how resilience goes weathered, not fresh. Black is still my densest note, an undertone that can be interpreted as mystery or raw determination, depending on where it lies upon the skin of the clay.
Artists know that colours possess a psychological edge that happens almost on a physical level. Infused with greens to soothe and repair; with oranges to stir up and inflame; blues to reassure us; and black to stabilize us in gravity and density. Blended with texture, colour makes beautiful, as well as informs.
Colour, Texture, and Perception: As I think about how colour adheres to the surface of texture, I recall Josef Albers' work. Albers instructed us in "Interaction of Colour" that colour is not necessarily an absolute.[1] He told us that it is relative and shifts with each slight change based on the colours and surfaces it's surrounded by.
This idea shifted my approach to working with the surfaces of ceramics. For Albers, our perception realigned with the adjacency of colours that were side by side. For ceramics, I have also the additional consideration: texture itself as context which alters colour perception.
If I apply a wash of copper oxide to a level, smooth surface of porcelain, the green is pale and almost filmy. But if I apply it to an incised rough surface, it pools in the troughs, deepening to dark mossy greens in hollows and remaining hard and lighter on high ridges. Texture creates micro-environments of light and darkness that cause us to perceive hue, value, and intensity differently.
That is, texture affects colour as deeply as do colours surrounding. Texture scatters and absorbs light to change saturation and depth. Rough matte surfaces scatter light to produce pale, subdued colour. Smooth glossy surfaces reflect to the maximum, intensifying hue and brightness.
For me, it's not just optics. It's emotional. While Albers showed how a red could be dull or bright based on the situation, I feel the way coarseness can age and toughen a colour, smoothness can leave it unruffled and unscathed. Texture becomes then an emotional colour modifier, communicating mood and connotation of what I'm doing.
This is the reason why I like to build up layers of slip or scoring in clay before washes and stains are added. The final finish is not so much a matter of chemistry or firing, but of how colour resides in the textures that I have built up, where it exists in a scooped-out line, adheres to the rough edge, or wipes back to reveal the highlights.
In ceramics, colour and texture are the irrepressible partners working together to create emotional and perceptual resonance. Colour, as taught by Albers, never alone, and in clay, never separate from texture. They are co-conspirators in telling the tale of surface and of feeling.
Surface as Story: Nature inspires my work. The animals I create don't represent any fairy tale to me or perform tidy stories for me. I want people to relate to them. To be capable of being part of nature and not feel that they are isolated. I hope that the surfaces I create give back the essence to them. It is this vitality that I want to pass along to people so they can understand the significance of the living object, of biodiversity itself.
A toad's back might be scored and massaged with copper oxide; green caught in each scratch. A falcon's feathers might be coated with dry clay, the scars painted black to signify strength and a kind of survivor's chew. Erratic colours excite. A polar bear might display an uneven patch of slip that holds darkness, subtle and potent, the promise of its life today.
In these works, a hairline crack in the glaze or a hairline break is not a flaw to hide but something to embrace. It's living. A scar. A reminder that we don't emerge smooth and unmarred; neither does clay.
This is consistent with "narrative ceramics"; stories being told not seemingly symbolically but in texture, colour, and movement. Not literal but sensory ones, existing in the gap between rough and smooth, control and release, restraint and licence.
Why It Matters: To the collector and the artist, texture and colour are not decoration. They are emotional devices, bridges which permit us to express what we experience but are often unable to articulate. They allow us to have available to us the tensions of contradiction such as despair and hope, fear and freedom, weakness and strength so that we may think about them.
If I am stuck in the studio, working on the surface is grounding action. I also share this with other artists who come to me upset over their work. Stuck in your head, the sensuality of clay and surface can take you back in your body. They remind you sensation is in your hands, not your head. It's a way of experiencing your feelings without necessarily solving them.
Invitation to Look: And the next time you notice a hole, a scratch or an object's imprint on a chunk of ceramics, or a patch of burnt colour heaped in a pit, pause. Stand with it. Say to yourself: "What mood hangs here? What tension or reality lies hidden in that ridge?"
Let the surface speak. Let your hands experience what perhaps your words cannot. Our body remembers what our words sometimes lose sight of, that feeling is experienced best in touch and nearness. Clay, once fired, carries memory. The surface remembers us, and we remember the surface.
Conclusion: Surface memory. Clay writes. Texture is tense; colour is mood. If we allow ourselves to notice, to touch and trace a finger along a rough juncture or a smooth transition of raw metallic oxides, we become part of a more real, a more interior story.
There in those stories, we find fragments of ourselves reflected, not always beautiful, but ever real. That is what the surface provides: that feeling is out there, available, if we will learn to look.
[1] Albers, Josef. (1963) Interaction of Color. Yale University, New Haven, CT, US
