A metamorphosis... The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art.

Contemporary' was in those days [1953] synonymous with 'modern' as it had not been before and is not now [1977].

Those words . . . national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.

...failure with clay was more complete and more spectacular than with other forms of art. You are subject to the elements... Any one of the old four - earth, air, fire, water - can betray you and melt, or burst, or shatter - months of work into dust and ashes and spitting steam. You need to be a precise scientist, and you need to know how to play with what chance will do to your lovingly constructed surfaces in the heat of the kiln.