At the top of the mountain surrounded by trees and clouds, you find yourself within the elements. In one instance, the heat of the sun is beating down on the wet clay, drying and rapidly cracking its surface whilst baking your own skin. Next, a swift change to visceral thunderstorms rattling the roof shackles as the wind whips its way around the studio picking up loose sheets of paper and tousling the calico curtains. In the chaos you are centred, on the wheel wrestling with your own battle of the elements; safe, calm and strong, firmly plonked on your stool, legs wrapped closely to the wheel. The studio acts as your cocoon.
‘Faced with the bestial hostility of the storm and the hurricane, the house’s virtues of protection and resistance are transposed into human virtues. The house acquires the physical and moral energy of a human body. It braces itself to receive the downpour, to grid its loins. When forced to do so, it bends with the blast, confident that it will right itself again in time, while continuing to deny any temporary defeats. Such a house as this invites mankind to heroism of cosmic proportions’. Gaston Bachelard, ‘La Poétique de l’Espace – (The Poetics of Space),’ 1958.