The Ceramist thinks in the same way as an architect, he encloses space within walls. The body of a living being is a structure of cavities, separated from the outer world by a skin surface. If a ceramist takes any living creature as a model, he almost immediately bumps against the miracle of the constructing from the inside principle. Such a sculpture constructed from the inside changes shape according to forces as living beings do. In addition, it adjusts itself to the environment, just as the environment adjusts to living beings. This mutual formal interaction can be the starting principle for a new partnership between artist an(1 architect.

Clay is actually a living material. We cannot consider it simply as a raw material but must accept it as a partner if we want authentic answers to our questions.

I here is an additional important question, and that is the relation between the building and the art object decorating it. Since art collecting started about three hundred years ago, object fallen or taken off various buildings became independent of them. The works thus placed in the public art collections and museums started to influence artists, and now almost every body creates exclusively for museums. That is the cause of the present situation in which today’s art is not able to develop an organic unity with architecture and its environment.

More than a decade has passed since I saw, among the Asian masterpieces of the Arts museum in Kyoto, a colored pottery figure in height hardly more than on-and-a-half times the span of my hand, standing alone in the middle of a glass case. The paint was gone where soil acids had eaten it away here and there. The figure, from the Tang period, represents a lady at court. Then years is a long time but I could not forget the figure, although it had been surrounded but many other marvelous pieces of which l had hazier memories.

I thought of that court lady again as I started modeling figures at Herend. How fine it would be to create something as lasting as that, something able to speak over the centuries as that pottery figure had spoken tome. I know pottery and porcelain do not command the respect in Europe that they do in the East. Not even figures by johann Joachim Kandler or Franz Anton Bustelli are displayed in the inner sanctums of fine art, although they are works of the same caliber as their distant Tang dynasty relatives. Could I produce porcelain figures I would not blush to see in the same room with the works of immortal masters? I was setting myself a very high standard, for apart from the more distant models, Herend Porcelain today requires it. The Herend manufactory, as it passes its 175th anniversary, conserves exceptional knowledge of craft skills that must not be wasted on work of a lower standard. If I have had the good fortune to realize my ideas through these world-famous craftsmen and craftswomen, like a composer having his work performed by a superlative orchestra, I can only, in all humility, submit to them of my best.

I was helped in by t he whirl of t he Venetian Carnival, which I could not even imagine in any other medium than porcelain. Lately I have been making human figures for the Herend porcelain Manufactory in Hungary. In my opinion in this knowledge-based society clay is the best means to search for the origin of art. The most ancient and the most up-to-date forms were made from this material. In my life I always strived to search that common factor which is identical, or constant in both the ancient and the modern forms.