Bill has chosen the medium of ceramic sculpture because it offers extraordinary flexibility combined with a hard material.The challenge is to work both with and against the nature of the clay, using its softness and malleability at the start of the process and playing with its fragility and brittle hardness.

Stretching the clay to very thin layers ensures a great deal of variety in the shaping of the sculpture but also risks breaking, especially during the drying process before the piece is fired in the kiln. The thin layers suggest various textures — paper, cloth, leather, beaten metal, parchment. Since most of those materials have been used to record ancient and modern documents, Bill often evokes centuries past by hinting at obscure alphabets and hidden languages lying just beneath the surface.These writings peek out through the layers of centuries of overwriting, forming what the Greeks called “palimpsests.” Initially, palimpsests were writings on parchment which had been partially erased and written over, an effort to reuse the rare and expensive parchment. With the passage of time, the original writings sometimes once again became legible, or at least perceptible. Bill pursues myth and iconic imagery through other ways of uncovering text and allusion.The constant in Bill's work is to find the new by evoking the ancient. "Art is the process of uncovering the layers of knowledge, feeling, and myth in the artist and in the spectator."

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