I originally did that apricot, that last fruit, in a low-fire glaze. But for the apples, I steered away from being that descriptive with the glazes because they died for me, except for ones in which I would layer quite a few low-fire glazes. There's this fuzzy speckling you can get in low-fire, which I wanted.

Normally, you would make little rectangular tiles of clay and you'd fire it and you'd have fifty little things to test the glaze on, till you got roughly what you want. But these apples are round and irregular rather than flat, and the glaze moves on them in very particular ways depending on the size and the angles of their curves, so I couldn't test on strips. I had to test on the object.

Deacon Jones, Jessica Rath, high-fire glazed porcelain, 2012. The Deacon Jones is the largest apple in Rath's inventory, at a magnificent and somewhat incredible seven inches tall.

This one [above], the Deacon Jones, probably took one hundred tests. This was the hardest one, even though it's the straightest glaze. All of the others are tweaked a little, but the glaze on this is pretty straight. It's called Vegas Red and it does get this red but usually only in parts or pieces, say, at the bottom of the bowl. It doesn't stay a solid red. And it also drips. So to get it to actually sit there and get this red all over is one out of one hundred, if you're lucky. ="#v=onepage&q&f=false">

It's also down to a very, very close relationship with the ceramic technician that took about two years to build, so that after two years of watching me fail over and over again, he put it in a sweet spot in the kiln. He's Japanese, and he's pretty old-school, and I think he thought I had finally worked hard enough that I deserved a sweet spot. There's only one or two of them in the kiln. All of a sudden I got three perfectly red apples in a month. I knew I was improving over time, but it was that relationship, too.

PI 588933.12 (Unnamed cluster), Jessica Rath, high-fire glazed porcelain and bronze, 2012

This is an unnamed apple [above], which is based on trees in the orchard that were grafted from wild apples in Kazakhstan, from the original home of the apple. It's low-fire over high-fire. I was interested in this sort of speckling blush that they had, but then the blush took over. My approach was to get to a point with the experimentation where I found something that grabbed me and then let it go with that and work with that.

Twilley: That sounds a little like the apple breeding process.

Yes--I found a quality I liked and then I bred and bred to refine it, essentially. This is a Dulcina, which is another one with a blush that I arrived at while I was trying to get the rest of it into a more green or yellowish stage. I loved the metaphor of the night sky that's held in it, so I just went for that.

Dulcina, Jessica Rath, high-fire glazed porcelain, 2012

There's supposed to be an edition of two of each of these apples, and I'm unable to replicate this one. It's the last one. I'm still working on it. After you leave, I'll go up to the kiln again. The idea of producing an edition of two is an odd one in sculpture, but it made sense for the apples: they're always planted in pairs in the orchard, as a Noah's Ark idea--in case something happens to one.

Whiteness, Jessica Rath, high-fire glazed porcelain, 2012

These final ones [above] are very, very pale yellow on the tree and when the sun hits them they turn white. You know that they're yellow, but when you're in this orchard, things look different. I've described it to people as being like when you go fishing, and when you catch a fish, it has a certain glimmer to the skin while it's alive. As soon as you kill it, as soon as it's dead, the whole sheen shifts into a kind of grey. The depth of the color is not the same. It's immediate.

PI 594107.j5 (unnnamed--whiteness) (Jessica Rath, 2009)

I swear that these apples have the same thing. There's something about them when they're on the tree--they have this luminosity. As soon as you pick them, the depth of the color isn't there, and the whiteness is just a pale yellow. You can't capture it in a photograph, either. That's why I chose ceramics. I've no business doing any ceramics. I've never done it before. I'm a sculptor, but sculptors and ceramicists are usually in separate departments. But when I saw what the glazes could do, I thought that I could catch that life again.