“What I am looking for in my work with 'clay and fire' lies in their own essential beauty and the play between them - a beauty subjective, difficult to define, control or repeat - something to do with chance coincidence. My methods are as simple / direct as possible where chance has space to surprise. This leads me along a narrow ridge between my will and that of the material.”

Martin McWilliam's vessel objects are removed from practical utility. They tell of an artistic examination of the form and its surface. The ceramist has developed a design language in which the vessel is "ironed" into the surface and the volume of a hollow body expected by the viewer is only simulated. This original and innovative game of optical illusion, confusion and irritation is continued when bisected vessels stand as a torso on a metal plate or when vessel abbreviations appear in foreshortened perspective as sparse scratched drawings on a ceramic plate. The appeal of the fragmentary is to be emphasized as well as the appeal to the viewer's imagination to fill in what is missing.

Our viewing habits are also called into question by the artistic deceptive effects, which can be reminiscent of Cubist painting. As in the cubist paintings, forms are broken in the ceramics and different perspectives are interwoven. The aim of this artistic position is to guide the viewer around the disassembled object in an imaginary manner, which addresses the tension between space and time.

McWilliam’s work imprints itself into a very long tradition that dates far beyond the strands of modernity and the concept of art as we know it, at the same time as he points to the most advanced scientific studies. In premodern cultures the cultic object would form a bridge between this world and the divine forces beyond human understanding.

Today we investigate these fields in the context of consciousness studies, Superstring theory and quantum physics that all end up questioning the present view on reality. Both represent and materialize a connexion between the world as we know it and the space that is beyond human consciousness. Compared to the cultic object, in a postmodern context McWilliam creates a similar passage, precisely because his works adapt and incorporate the postmodern reality.

The play with dimensions openly tells the story of postmodern deconstruction, but still, essence has not been lost. The extended awareness that is created as time and space merge offers us a possibility to get in touch with those deeper layers of human existence. The most existential experiences expressed in the humble form of a vessel.

And yet another level of meaning of these vessel objects must be emphasized: the demonstration of the unreliability of our sensory perceptions. There is a parallel to Zen Buddhism and its original distrust of visible things in their impermanence and nothingness.