Splice

The third fire in ceramics is the final, experimental firing used for lustres and overglazes, where surface becomes reflective, iridescent, and unpredictable. An extra layer of decoration is applied after the main glaze has already set — metallic films, colour shifts, or enamel veils fired at lower temperature. It’s a stage of refinement and risk: the moment when something complete is returned to the kiln for one last transformation. The result is often fragile and volatile, yet illuminated by depth and complexity — a surface that seems to think for itself. In both craft and industry, the third fire is where material reaches consciousness.

The Third Mind (1978) by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin proposed that collaboration creates a hybrid intelligence — an unseen author born from two creative forces working together. Their cut-up technique sliced and reassembled text to reveal new meanings, freeing language from linear thought. In that sense, the third mind is not just a partnership, but an alchemical act: when two systems intersect, something else appears between them. A new grammar, a new awareness — neither one thing nor the other, but both at once. That same principle underpins this body of work: the idea that creativity can be shared between human and machine, and that the friction between them generates something unexpected.

What you see here are not photographs of ceramics, and no clay or camera was used. These are synthographs — images written, not taken — produced through collaboration between myself and artificial intelligence. The prompts act as clay; language becomes the object. Through iteration, direction, and choice, the work emerges as a dialogue rather than a command. This is the third fire and the third mind combined: the moment when human intention and machine perception fuse into a single image. Synthography is not imitation, but invention — the practice of shaping possibility into form. Each piece is a record of that union: a fired thought, a lucid hallucination, an artefact from the mind of the image itself.