Working within the structure of functional pottery, ceramicist Mark Pharis' vessels display a complex and expressive understanding of form. His vases, teapots, soy bottles and other containers have a remarkably subtle sense of structure. Pharis comes from an important lineage of potters having studied with Warren MacKenzie, America’s most influential apprentice of the British potter Bernard Leach. Pharis' unique methods of building his clay pots by enclosing a volume through cuts and folds in a flat slab of clay is not unlike a dressmaker or a tinplate metal worker. The seams and joints of this construction process are left visible, serving both as a framework to describe the form and to emphasize a roundness and contained energy of the volume. From the Series:What Follows