Ceramics crept up on me in Tokyo. I was a language student living with a local family, fretting over how many pen-strokes might make up the Japanese character for unlikely words like 'magic' or 'caterpillar'. My homestay mother was a modest but passionate cook. Her plain, white cupboards contained shelves of neatly piled sake cups and sure-footed rice bowls. She chose carefully according to the colours and textures of the food she had cooked. Roughly hewn carrots piled high in a tiny mountain might sit in an angular, industrially produced white porcelain plate while a pale fish fillet might lie untroubled in its dark, temmoku bowl. This is how the visual world burst in on me. I gained a slow but intense education from handling bowls and plates of different weights, designs and clays. Not for a minute did I think that this concentrated attention to objects would lead anywhere. I returned to Cambridge to finish my Japanese degree, no more expecting to end up a potter than an astronaut.
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