Woodfiring is the oldest method of pottery production and to my mind the most exciting. One of Britain's leading exponents of the art, Nic Collins, returns to the Harlequin Gallery for the fourth time to exhibit the best of the work he has produced from his recent kiln firings.

Many potters are happy to buy prepared clay and to fire the resultant pots in an electric kiln, but mixing your own clay and then firing an anagama kiln, looking primordial like some ancient burial mound, is something else.

I suspect that Nic has an innate need to go through the trials and tribulations of the 3 to 4 day firings to a temperature of over 1300 degrees, producing a fire so hot that it melts ash into a landscape of colour upon the pot's surface. Even then the process is not finished, as there is the long cooling period and then days of cleaning the pots that have survived. Of course, if you are really brave you can follow Nic's lead and re-fire some of the pots all over again - up to seven times in extreme cases! As the potter, Michael Cardew, once said, "The effort to overcome technical problems and difficulties is an integral part of the content, the expression which (the potter) puts into his work."