I have loved watching Prue Venables’ pieces become, over time, more and more wondrous: always teaching me to look, slowly, to see more carefully, with great respect, and great delight.

Her work so artfully combines stillness and a sense of risk, of fragility. Sometimes it is a single object – a pierced ladle with a precariously long stem, perhaps, or a scoop with an elegant, daring, ribbon-like handle, that surprises and then calms, Then there are those seemingly arbitrary couplings or slightly perverse groupings that quietly and insistently demand a shift in our perception.

Indeed they all were once, in the making process, exceedingly fragile; needing, before and during both bisque and high temperature reduction firing, to be propped up or supported upside down and fired on porcelain trays or setters: carefully, patiently, slowly, surely, crafted. But now, strong, dense, confident, beautiful - to be used, to be held.

I hope you see Prue’s pots when the sun is out. They quicken with light, The pale objects are softly luminous and translucent, while the dark aubergines and blacks glow satiny rich, their rims reflecting.

Prue has won many awards, and her work is highly respected in many countries by her peers and collectors alike: not because it is spectacular, or dramatic (though drama there is), but surely as a response to an integrity, the generosity of time given, a playfulness that is highly intelligent, while somehow remaining innocent. Well, so it seems to me. I will even speak of goodness. These are among those ‘small good things’ so needed at a time like this.