CC: Well, this is a labour of love, I think. [It's] much stronger in the object in terms of the pigments, it's much denser than in the photograph. It's amazing that blue where it kind of absorbs light, or that slip seems really seam-like, it's stepping forward. Although, they are slightly in relief, some of these colours. But it really gives that sense of the shifting planes of the view. 'Optical Pot'... you know, you do feel that optical illusion [that] the thing's moving about. And you're uncertain where you should be standing, even though I know she talked about her pots having a particular viewpoint for viewing them, almost like how you'd view a painting, I suppose.
[It's] incredibly delicate, much more refined and pared away than I thought in terms of its weight. It's very interesting this collar, it's almost strange. I wonder what she was listening to at the time? It's kind of screeching, sometimes, and moves you back and forth. But very, very sophisticated in its slight qualities here, where that blue just comes into that plane... whether it was intentional, it looks like [it was] intentional, it looks like it's carefully thought, but it's so carefully thought through, it just makes me feel quite inferior, really. But when you view it from the back, it just doesn't say anything really, it really does need that point of view.
I think this is interesting, as well. In the time when I was studying in Cork a lot of our tutoring at the time would have been referencing people like Elizabeth Fritsch and Jill Crowley and Alison Britton, and the flavour of that runs through all their work is quite interesting in dealing with similar issues. [video clip starts] But there's something incredibly reserved about it as well, which I really like. I like the fact that it is painstakingly mapped out and considered. It's not about spontaneity. The spontaneity seems to come in the inspiration of what she's referencing, whether it's music or sound. It does have those. And she's kept a very simple palette of three or four colours and has kept to that. And that kind of variation throughout is just very, very brilliant. [video clip ends] I do remember somebody, Peter Meanly, who was studying in the Royal College of Art, and he went to look at the box of pots in one of the offices of somebody applying for a place, and he said, 'There were all these pots, and there was a very tiny, little pinch pot by somebody called Liz at the time,' and he was incredibly moved by them. Well, I can see why. That's quite, quite something.