Michael Lancaster studied pottery by apprenticeship and began his career in 1976. He makes sculptural forms on a pottery wheel and fires them in a Raku kiln, where they undergo immense change which is reflected in their surface. He works together with his wife, sculptor Barbara Harnack. His signature shape, the round house, is universal in architecture. From the African Kikuyu mud huts and the Tata Samba, the Navajo Octangular Hogan, the Pueblo kivas and even the US coastal light houses, the round structure has always represented a sacred or safe place. These habitat structures have only one function: they give the viewer a sense of something safe for themselves.

“I am inspired by ‘primitive architecture’ and old industrial artifacts. If only people would allow themselves to see the simple basic way of things, from the world of nature to the inventions of mankind…”