Daley described his commitment to the vessel form nearly 25 years ago: "To me the expressive quality of a vessel form is of first importance. My work is an attempt to experiment with these forms. My interests are sculptural rather than utilitarian. Work created to be held, touched, and seen is valid to the degree that a person responds to its form. Its presence is the vessel's reason for being."

Where is the vessel's realm of action? Do we look inside or outside? Daley attempted a solution to the problem in 1956 when he constructed a nine-inch-high cylinder, then sliced it through the middle. As a result, the cylinder walls were literally both inside and outside.

There is another way of looking at this duality: Is the vessel convex or concave? does it appear to us as a body, a mass, or does it recede from us as a space, a vacuum? Certain vessel forms--notably the jug, the jar, the vase--are primarily convex; we experience them as bodies standing before us, as we do human bodies. Yet despite their presence, we know they are centered upon an absence. Their inner space virtually gives them the appearance of a person standing at attention, full of breath, full of life. Daley makes the acute observation that a good deal of this presence derives from the column of space that runs up through the vertical axis, almost as palpably as a spinal column. Other vessels are primarily concave--the bowl, for example, and its many variation. We perceive such forms as spaces to be filed. The bowl becomes a pictorial field, a ground for symbols, designs, or imaginary vistas.

Daley has balanced these two facets of the vessel by making inside and outside equally arresting. The inside surface reads as a negative of the outside, and vice versa. In Toas Procession, for example, he has furnished the inside surface with convex features, and the outside surface with concave ones. Every contour has a corresponding negative of itself. Daley, who once taught at the University of New Mexico, has been stimulated by the design pot Pueblo Indian pottery. As he expressed it, "Swirling lines, step patterns and zigzags took me inside the pots. Stark black and white patterns were like looking out at bright places from dark interiors."

Another striking feature of Daley's work is his treatment of the edge of the vessel. For the lip of a vase, the rim of a bowl, is the tightrope on which our perceptions of the vessel must balance. It can be a kind of frame, delimiting a body (vase) or bounding a pictorial field (bowl). The archetypal vessel --the cupped hands, the woven basket, the split gourd or skull, or any form close to the hemisphere being equally convex and concave, equally mass and space, the edge is most important because it forms the transition from one to the other.

Since the edge becomes the entrance or passageway to our experience of the vessel, Daley's playful transfigurations of its form are especially apt. The edges of his vessels are either thin and sharp (Axial Inn, Our Turn) or curled and folded to form soft, rounded contours (Onegas Passage). He also combines these two kinds of edge in a single work(Toas Procession).. The complicated pattern of a Daley rim is never the common or expected sort of thing, so our eye is immediately drawn to tracing its perimeter. The rim is more than simply an access route to the pot., however. For we encounter barriers, false doors ramps leading nowhere, small spoutlike ducts and rims that nearly conceal what they frame. There are even pots that are almost all rim. Their lips resemble processional staircases, which our eye is compelled to follow up and down and back again.

Enticed by all this, we fall victim to Daley's seductive logic and jump in. Once inside, however, we are keenly aware of the outside, now out of view. Alternately, we experience the corresponding absence of inside while viewing the outside. There is no split gourd or skull, or any form close to the hemisphere being equally convex and concave, equally mass and space, the edge is most important because it forms the transition from one to the other

Even Daley's titles are a clue to this central theme in his work. The carved patterns of Toas Procession and Onegas Passage, for example, might be viewed as dance notations for a Pueblo Indian ceremony; as we follow their twists and turns, a kind of performance is conjured up in our imagination. There are few other ceramists today whose work is so expressive of rhythm and movement. Our Turn, which seems to pirouette, and Axial Inn, which we enter by tracing its downward spiral, are but two more examples of the correspondence between Daley's art and choreography.

Speaking of his chosen discipline recently, Daley likened the vessel to a sonata; each métier, he noted has its own particular virtues. Although he is not suggesting that a Bach sonata and a Daley pot are comparable creations, nevertheless both forms celebrate rhythm, harmony, movement and an almost mathematical structure. Does this not bring to mind Islamic art and architecture, which has also been likened to music? Wavering lines twisting rims, warm colors, and sensuous, textures all play their part in Daley's work. As Henri Focillon observed of Islamic ornament (a subject dear to Daley himself)l "...a sort of fever seems to goad on and to multiply the shapes; some mysterious genius of complication interlocks, enfolds, disorganizes and reorganizes the entire labyrinth.... Whether they be read as voids or solids, as vertical axes or as diagonals, each one of them both withholds the secret and exposes the reality of an immense number of possibilities."

Processional entrances, ceremonial spaces, rhythmic patterns that evoke the movements of dance and the harmonies of music --all these qualities merge in William Daley's ceramics. although unmistakably modern, his forms touch on all realms of life and therby link us to the ceremonial vessels of all peoples and all times.

William Daley's ceramics pictures in this article were on view in a solo exhibition at Helen Drutt Gallery, Philadelphia, PA and at Exhibit A, Chicago, IL.