Hayne Bayless

Artist Statement

The techniques of hand-building, extruding, and slab construction let me take advantage of clay's power to capture gesture. I'm intrigued by what happens when clay is rolled, stretched, pressed, incised, inlayed, bent, cut, and put back together. I love what spawns in the friction between what I'd like the stuff to do and what it would rather do. The unintended result, often misread as a mistake and so dismissed, is the most fertile source of new ideas. The trick is not to fool with clay's inherent desire to be expressive. It will offer – or impose – its own ideas about new forms and ways to work. I like what Constantin Brancusi wrote in 1927: “Each material has its own life ... we must not try to make materials speak our language, we must go with them to the point where others will understand their language.”