RAKU VESSELS

For many years most of my work was primarily vessel based and mainly handbuilt or press moulded, using coloured and laminated clays and Raku fired. The graphic qualities of the decoration and the contrasts in surface finish that raku allows are of paramount importance to me.

My involvement with raku came from a desire to use a firing process which required a far more direct and personal input. The work consists mainly of press moulded and handbuilt vessel forms, which I develop in series, allowing me to investigate the limitations of the applied surface decoration, whether this be contrasts of tone, texture, glazed and unglazed areas or the interplay of simple, almost classical forms with the graphic, highly coloured decoration. All the pots are subjected to a heavy post firing reduction, usually in dry sawdust or straw.

It is in the ability to control the design, decoration and carbonising of the unglazed areas to a totally individual level, added to the inevitable and unpredictable movement of crazing and shadows across the surfaces that, for me, the intrigue of raku lies.


"His distinctive Raku vessels – handbuilt from thin strips and ragged bits of colored clay pressed into slabs – have long conveyed the depth of his connections to the Welsh countryside. In these abstract works a modicum of forms convincingly conjures the deeply shadowed valleys and illuminated mountain peaks, the irregular fields that together form patchwork quilts over rolling hills, the omnipresent gray of slate and the leaden blue of still water under a winter sky.
As a landscape artist, Mattison is the Richard Diebenkorn of clay: a master of evoking a sense of place through broad, reductivist shapes and an intricately detailed repertoire of tone and hue."

Dr. Glenn R. Brown, Professor of Art History, KSU.