"Glaze Tectonics" is a body of work created by Alex Solla: When my daughter was born, I stopped making pots. It wasn't for lack of time, I just wasn't obsessed by making pots. Suffering from sleep deprivation that every parent knows comes with the first child, I began drawing. Deep rich colors in patterns I could only dream would work on my pots.

Having participated in Brian Gartside's "Gumboot Glazing" workshop, I had a new way of "cooking up" glazes by trying a pinch of this, a scoop of that. With some experimentation, I finally found ways to get the colors and textures I had imagined. I came to realize that a flat platter with a thick rim would be the best vehicle for these glazes, keeping them from running together into muddy puddles. After trial and error, I made a clay body that could withstand the rigors of being fired on the scale I had worked up to, and at the temperature my glazes demanded.

Sometimes I would open the kiln to find amazing surprises in the ways my glaze combinations interacted; sometimes I opened the kiln to find that one or more of the platters had ripped themselves in half, spilling all their glaze down into the kiln. I had to chip glaze off of a lot of kiln shelves, and subsequently had to find other ways to improve the survivability of these platters. Out of 1000+ platters, just shy of 100 survived.

In my experiments I exploited every glaze flaw that a potter usually tries to avoid. Bubbles, crazing, crawling; you name it, I made it happen on purpose. A happy overfiring accident, which necessitated a longer-than-usual cooling period, yielded a wonderful discovery: crystals! I was hooked, and had to try for more. At some point, the glazes stopped being combinations of materials to me, and became earthforms, land masses, fluid rivers, oceans and lakes.

These platters have taught me more about glaze, patience and serendipity than anything else I've done in the studio. More than anything else, I feel they have set me free.