martin piddington I am a British-born ceramic artist living and working in Kyoto, Japan. My main sphere of work is in porcelain, slip-cast figurative & abstract sculptures based on my own designs (albeit influenced by the angst of Bacon, the colour of Matisse, the spontaneous mayhem of Pollock, the lines of Schiele, Brancusi and Noguchi and the solid authority of Epstein & Moore). I perform every aspect of ceramic sculpture from drawing board inception right through to firing. The choice of porcelain as a medium not only stems from my use of it in wheel throwing but also from the desire to work on a "3-D canvas" - the white porcelain body of a sculpture offers an excellent - although difficult to manage - surface for carving, underglaze pigment painting, glazing and overglaze enamel painting.