of things rather than playing safe. I see that sense of adventure in Anne Mette’s pots. She comes from a long line of potters from Denmark, often female, who make or have made strong, gutsy pots with little thought to compromise. One thinks of the influential Gutte Eriksen or Lis Ehrenreich, Inger Rokkjaer, Ulla Hansen and Aase Haugaard — all female potters and all making pots of real presence and quality with apparently little consideration to fashion or worrying about the evaluation of others. Anne Mette’s pieces, particularly the large, monumental bottles, have a ‘take me or leave me’ arrogance. The running glazes and poured slips, the finger marks, the sweeps of under glaze and the brutally minimal marks are not begging to be loved but the combination of all of these elements create an edifice that draws one in for a closer look. In a ceramic world currently populated by far too many timid makers of insipid porcelain, these pieces are like a great storm gathering on the horizon — you want to run but curiosity draws you closer and you enter a world of primeval geology. The slab bottles are, to me at least, her tour de force. Each piece is a canvas and the salt glaze vapours her paint. I have made salt glaze in the past and probably will again in the future. I know how difficult it is to salt glaze in a wood fired kiln and to achieve the range of colours and textures extracted from slip, salt and atmosphere. Anne Mette has harnessed the fire and by clever placement of the pots in the kiln and the judicious application of slip and glaze she creates surfaces of great variation and depth of colour. They are not prissy or fussy — they are finished but not over finished. The sensitive placement of childlike
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