For a while I took up primitive pottery. I dug the clay up from a riverbed, picked out the stones and wedged it. The only tools I used in making the pots were sticks and stones, and I fired them in the driveway, in a pit kiln I dug myself. I made concessions to modern tools in the firing of the pots- to dig the pit and line it with straw and manure I used a shovel and a pitchfork, and I never have mastered the bow drill, so I used a lighter to start the fire.

I made lots of little pinch pots, but this is the last one I have left. It's stone burnished to a medium gloss, and the different colors are due to temperature variation in the fire.

The idea here is to express the dichotomy of being me. Life for me is a series of extremes, of light and dark, sorrow and giddiness. I'm also interested in the concept of masks and the face you present to the world.

I started saving the cups when the nurses brought me my meds. It was slow going, gluing them together, and day by day, as the sculpture grew, the other patients started contributing theirs. More than once a nurse would make the mistake of crumpling one up, only to be shouted at by some of the less skilled patients: "Peej is saving those!"

It became something of a community effort, collecting these cups. I began to paint small parts of the work in the colors of the medications we were collectively taking: Klonopin, Tegretol, Prozac, Nortriptyline, Lorezapam, Haldol. We trotted out the PDR (that raised some eyebrows!) to get the color matches just right.