Caroline Dechert

Chance and Change are at the heart of my work in clay.

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I love the serendipity of saggar, pit firing, obvara, and raku, where I can invite or encourage things to happen, but the materials have their own say in the final finish. Smoke and colorants will land where they want, and gluten strands in an obvara blend will swirl as they choose. There’s always an element of surprise, of chance.

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Embracing the swirl of smoke and color means embracing themes of change, transformation, creation and dissolving, metamorphosis. Nothing is static. Everything around us is changing somehow, as we are ourselves. No medium expresses that change as clay can. Many of my pieces seem not  quite finished, still caught in creation, or in the midst of shifting from one state to another, one thing to another. That’s how the world 

looks to me. I am captured by things not quite seen, glimpses at the edge of vision in twilight, the curl of water in the acequia, the turn and bloom of a flock of blackbirds, half-remembered scraps of dreams - 

chance and change.