The Sumus Series was started during a residency at the Mill Hall Clay Company in Mill Hall, PA. The company manufactured chimney flu pipe from an industrial brick clay that they mined and engineered on the site (up until 2010). I was given 24"-long clay pipe fresh from the extruder to work with. The clay had a quality unlike anything I had worked with. It was extremely course and rocky and at the same time plastic. The work was fundamentally about the nature of the material which lent itself well to my own ideas regarding the confusion, at least my confusion, about the overlapping histories of the figure and the vessel in ceramics. It also allowed me to push the notion of structure as ornament, an idea that what is interesting about a thing is also what physically allows it to stand.