thoughts

We feel our way into a vessel’s metaphors of containment and purpose in a visceral way, making connections to our own lived experiences and emotional associations.  The message from the utilitarian object is one of sensory allusion, within the context of the engagement posed by the function. 

When we were working together at Watershed in 2016, members of Objective Clay taped a video showcasing all of our unique approaches to making cups.  Here is my segment.

Dynamic disequilibrium means that as organisms living within the ecosystem of our lives, we live in a state of flux, continuously making small adjustments as we fall in and out of balance.  Temporary states of vertigo, after all, can liberate us to find new paths.  As makers, we are always imagining new visions and ideals that guide our studio practice, and our practice in turn is always revising those visions and ideals as they unfold into material.  Usually this means that the closer we come to manifesting our visions, the more those visions morph into a new set of ideals with their own revised demands.

For us makers, the meaning is in the making.  We can’t help but make the things that we need to have exist in the world.  We can’t help but use processes that align with our own internal mental and emotional processes.  Then, we tell stories about the objects and about our making of the objects as we present them to others.  The words we choose to use, though, are just words.  The objects themselves meet people’s hands and move with their gestures.  

The heart of pottery’s conceptual content resides in the space that an object fills in our lives; the pot is a positive that fills the negative formed by the gesture of a body.  When first designing forms for one person to feed another person, I decided to use actual hands as a slump mold for the gesture of offering.  It is significant that hands may be open and receptive during both actions of giving and of receiving. 

Our choices of process, form, and color all stand metaphorically as our vocabulary, and they do make statements.  In my case, visually active monochromatism has been one way to create a unified surface on a piece.  There’s a certain purity to that surface choice, a stillness but with depth to it, like looking into the stars on a quiet midnight.   Here are some of the stories told by the colors I have chosen.

This collection of images shows glazes that I developed using rare earth oxides as coloring agents.  Each image is split with halogen lighting on one side and fluorescent lighting on the other, to give an idea of the range of color the object might shift through in moving from space to space.  This color shifting calls into mind questions about the stability of color as a quality of an object – color becomes more a quality based on the surrounding light than it is an inherent quality within the object.

At the edges of our perceptual capacities lie mysteries enshrouded from our senses.  The infinitely small (the microscopic) and the infinitely huge (the universe) are realms easier navigated by our imaginations than our bodies.  The microscopic world, invisible to our naked eye yet existing everywhere, represents that which lies beyond our conscious awareness:  our dreams, collective memory, and sources of emotions.