All the pots were wheel thrown until 1975.  Wayne Branum had gone off to grad school a thrower of functional pots and after a year with Wayne Higby, came back a builder of slab built Raku vases and jars.  I was angry at first (angry because Branum went off an accomplished potter, in my mind, and I thought he should not be messed with), but I was also intrigued.  What would I do if I ever made a slab pot?  By this time I had not made sculpture in about ten years.  Sculpture was too difficult.  I had struggled to get abstracted figurative sculpture to “work” fully from all sides.  I found that when looking at one angle, I couldn’t remember what the other side did exactly.  I wasn’t thinking fully in three dimensions.  (I didn’t fully understand my own work.)  Making pots on the wheel solved the problem.  The other side just kept reappearing as it rotated on the wheel.  But I was struggling with the limitation of shape that the wheel imposed and the idea of hand-building was seductive.

The first slab pots were boxes and box-like vases – think smallish cereal boxes.  (I continued to throw as well until 1978.  After that, it’s all slab.)  I assembled the six slabs to form an airtight box so that I could deform it into something interesting without collapsing it. The air gave it strength from within.  Once I got a shape I liked, I let the “pot” firm up until it could support itself, then I either cut a hole in the top (vase) or cut the top off (box).  I usually added some kind of feet.

Wayne Branum’s raku box

Lidded box circa 1976

Slab vase circa 1976