The title of my work is borrowed from a quotation by a master potter, who completed the conversation about creating potteryware with his scholar saying: “The first 30.000 pots you make are the worst”.

“The first 30.000 are the worst”

The sheer number of pieces is supposed to provide not only true mastery,

but rather abolish the will to design, even eliminate it, in favour of form-finding based on the supposedly unconscious and the conditions of the material as well as the work process. The work is completed purely by hand, without being characterised by mannerism. We are striving for the quality of the potteryware as we admire it in a museum. As we see it nicely displayed, completely isolated, however sophisticatedly illuminated. According to its origin, it is mass-produced and anonymous; however, we see it as a reflection of an unmatched sensitivity for the design as well as of the will to create only witnessed in times long gone.

Several tons of porcelain mass are now waiting in my cellar to be shaped into vessels in the next few years. Vessels with numbers from 00001/30000 to 30000/30000. Vessels that will carry the inevitable of these times within, something that we can now neither see nor shun and that will shine in a completely different light after decades have passed. Vessels in which the arbitrary and spontaneous role of the design, together with the conditions of the shaped material, will be expressed to varying degrees.