Functional Pottery Statement Feeling Equals Form Equals Feeling Technique in any art form is necessary, but represents only a beginning from which the artist departs to test assumptions, hone perceptions and push perceived limits to explore the unknown. As an American artist, projection of the essence that comprises individual identity as a manifestation of feelings and thought process represents the primary reason for art making. Through the employment of focused attention, engaged, heightened awareness and constant decision making, balanced by and funneled through the vortex of intuition, a vocabulary of markmaking is established through gesture, finger pressure and varying wheel speed. The resulting choreography of overlapping time sequences combined with an attempt to push the material through its extreme toward collapse is used as an abstract means to add tension, establish tone, create mood and to ultimately convey feelings from the artist to the object and through it, as medium, to the recipient during use: feeling equals form equals feeling. — James Makins James Makins: 15 Years in Tokoname/Exhibition at Gallery Kyouei-Gama, Tokoname, 2008 Cylinders, Decanters on Tray, detail. photo by Yamaoka Yasuhiro, August