This Month at Green River Pottery: January 2010
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life stored up in the leafless bough set free,
life weaving its patterns during winter in the twig,
life in the ditch waters flowing softly south,
life laundering winter from its cores
to accommodate
the brimming fiesta of spring
- JS Baca, ‘Winter Poems along the Rio Grande’
Life Stored Up
Spring begins December 21st, you could say, when the sun changes course in the sky and the days start getting longer. Life is still getting stored up in the leafless trees—I love this image from Baca's poem—I love the bare trees, their patterns, it’s the way I picture them when I draw trees on the sides of pots. I draw trunks and branches. And it’s true that when you grab a twig, walking through the snow this time of year, and take a close look, you can see the leaves in their latent form, tightly rolled like the lumps of clay in my studio that are wedged up and ready to throw.
I had a dream the other night in which my studio was a vast open space—there were clay scraps on the floor (of course) but room itself was big and uncluttered, ready to accommodate a new project. No dusty jumble on the shelves, no leftover pieces, no unglazed bisque. Fulfilling my New Year’s resolution (sometimes) not to turn on my computer at the beginning of the day but to head directly to the studio, I arrive there these cold mornings with an hour more than I’m used to—the time seems longer, slower, and without any immediate deadlines my work rhythm is a little more diffuse—I allow myself to digress. There are few interruptions as the day goes along.
I throw with a slight restlessness, a slight dissatisfaction. Isn’t there another way to shape the shoulders of these vases? And how long have I been making teapots this way, ten years? Isn’t it time to come up with a new approach? I scan my CD collection for music I haven’t heard recently. I’m teaching a couple classes at the moment, and last night as I watched a student pulling a cylinder of clay up on the wheel, she said, as the walls got thin and tall, “okay, now it’s time to start thinking about what shape to give the pot, right?”
“Right,” I said. “What, uh, do you think you want to make?”
She let the wheel stop turning and thought for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said. We both stared at the clay. I felt almost envious, since I rarely allow myself this moment, though I guess it’s the moment I’m in, now, with my own work: the moment of not knowing, not making, not finishing—when the clay is ready, when the floor is empty and wide-open, and anything could happen there.
