The cuir bouilli bowls are essays on the effects of 'boiling' leather and the means of controlling it. They were the first successful objects I made using the cuir bouilli process and remain a favoured means of both exploring the process and developing new ways of controlling it. They allow me to pose questions about the aesthetic possibilities of virtuoso handling of materials, as well as questions about how our experience of and our consequent expectations of a material effect our perception of it and of the objects we make from it. With the bowls these expectations tend to render the leather unrecognizable. Seeing hardened forms of this kind in leather is simply beyond the experience of most people. The irony of this is of course that the work is intimately connected to the particular character and abilities of the material. The confusion that can result from such apparently minor gaps in knowledge or lapses in our attention to detail have larger implications for our abilities to know and understand what we see.