Hayne Bayless’ work is handbuilt stoneware or porcelain, often reduction-fired, using slab techniques and extruded elements, some with added handles and stems of metal or hand-carved hardwood.

“The unintended result, often misread as a mistake and so dismissed, is one of the most fertile sources of new ideas. The trick is not to fool with clay’s inherent desire to be expressive.

Pay attention to the clay, not only for the sake of each piece, but because the clay will offer – or impose – its own suggestions of new forms and ways to work.

My pots are not so much about harmony, although that does happen, but more about tension. I love what spawns in the friction between what I want the material to do and what it would rather do.”