The first frog pieces like the frogs hopping on the lily pads of Emma Hippo, had nothing to do with the FrogWorld. They were frogs in our own world. This carved frog pot shows National Geographic-type frogs carved into the thick sides of this lidded pot. My pots always had thick sides and even thicker bottoms. I was never much of a potter.

The ealiest FrogWorld pieces concern the cultures and religions of the frogs that lived in The Great Swamp which in our world is the Mediterranian Sea. One of the more unusual religions and mythologies to come out of that area was the Judeo-Christian epic.

This was the second lidded common frog pot with a sort of crumby Statue of Liberty towering over a map of The United States. I have always enjoyed making maps out of clay for some reason. I have made large maps of Africa, North America and over and over again, complete globes.

This is the first frog pot. When I started the piece they were just common frogs but by the time the piece was finished, I had begun thinking of them as survivors of a great holocaust, who must fight for dominance in a world filled with mutant creatures. They won.

In the first frog series a troop of frogscouts take the traditional tour of their world. They visit all the great monuments, attend renowned sporting events and generally aquaint themselves with their world and culture. Here, they take the obligatory hike up Mt. Olympus.

Here, the frogscouts are at the ruins of The Parthenon just in time for a picnic lunch.

Not surprisingly, the frogscouts find here several of the pieces of my frogworld counterpart, FrogFred.

Another stop on their tour, they visit a museum which featured art that rather than being timeless is only of the moment.

I always liked to end things like my repeated attempts to rid the world of FrogFood, but, it doesn't always work. Such was the case here. But it is still a lot of fun to cover a sculpture with that foamy white glaze that hobbiests use to put snow on their Christmas trees.

In the FrogWorld, their philosophers were slightly more practical than in our world. They only made their angels crowd onto the head of a 10-penny nail.

One of the great sporting events they attended was The Continual Civil War. After the tour, they met up at a well known memorial to the beginning of the war over a hundred years previous.

I started blowing up the world in my basement in Regina in 1969. I made this much larger version without firecrackers the following year. My gallery shipped it off for a show in Japan in 1971, but it was never shown as the exhibition committee was annoyed that all I showed of Japan was a large volcano.