Judy Trim was a potter whose work is as much concerned with mystery and magic as it is with process and technique. Echoing William Blake, she believed that technique should not be slavishly pursued for its own sake, but that technique will follow idea. This was certainly something she practised in her work as a potter, as she became increasingly interested in such age-old processes as building pots by coiling and smoothing, and the effects of "primitive" firing methods that for her involved burying the pot in sawdust. Here the pieces emerge bearing the random marks of the flame and smoke.

Although her family was more concerned with science than art, her father, a research scientist at Cambridge, encouraged Judy as a child to concentrate on art. At the County High School for Girls in Cambridge she took A levels in the arts and natural sciences, and in the early Sixties she went on to Bath Academy of Art, Corsham. Here she gained a hothouse education that stressed experiment and discovery rather than skill or process. With such luminaries as Howard Hodgkin and James Tower to inspire, she was encouraged to investigate natural form and what she described as the Bauhaus ethic in drawing and painting.

A period of teaching followed, in schools including the Alice Owen School in Islington, north London, with Trim enjoying what she called her Luddite sense of economy, whilst concentrating on education rather than her practice as a potter. A "rock and roll" marriage to Roger Waters, of Pink Floyd, a childhood sweetheart, proved to be both turbulent and stimulating, but failed after seven years.

For 10 years Trim lived alone in London and began to pot seriously, focusing on coiled pots, building them slowly and precisely before smoothing and polishing the surface. For her they were a way of searching for expressing feelings of warmth, generosity, calm and hope. Beautifully crafted, the forms, which included rounded bowls, teardrop jars and bottles with tall, slender necks, she saw as representing an archetype that was basic, timeless and human. Trim was particularly concerned with the analogy between the vessel and such feminine principles as holding and preserving.

For an exhibition at the Anatol Orient gallery in Portobello Road, London, in 1989 Trim explored a new interest in ancient cultures, finding inspiration in the processional qualities of formal and powerful rituals that seemed embedded in form and decoration. These included the Egyptian cosmologies, Peruvian vessels and Cycladic containers, all of which she thought were free of the cant, however well-intentioned, of modernism.

A marriage to the architect and painter Leonard Hessing followed by the birth of a son, Theo, while disrupting, did not prevent her from making pots. There are wonderful photographs of Trim, tall, elegant and posed, working with the child happily strapped to her back. At this point her shapes started to get larger and take on a sculptural quality.

The discovery of lustres proved to be a turning-point in the realisation of Trim`s ideas. The sensuous sawdust-fired surfaces of her pots, suitably polished and burnished, proved an ideal surface for her meticulously painted designs. Making full use of the pastel shades available, Trim subtly devised surfaces that seemed to radiate light and strength, the intricate shapes providing an interlocking web of mystery and intrigue as they both created and broke up the surface. Some inc

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