A Potter’s Notebook: August 2009
Retrograde
Well the future for me is already a thing of the past…
- B. Dylan
A new beginning—moving to a new studio in a new town—this is the time for a brand new start, for putting the past to rest and striking out in a new direction.
Or is it? One of the things I love about traveling is that it frees me from the sense that things are always moving toward the future in a predictable way—that time is linear. It isn’t. Traveling, sometimes you arrive at a new place and feel thrown into a new time, too—you’re immersed in past, or, like The Soldier returning home in A Soldier’s Tale, you find that what has been three days for you has been three years for the rest of the world. You’ve been thrown into your own future too soon.
It’s the same with moving, I guess. In June I relocated my clay studio, home, and business to Santa Fe. This’ll be great, I thought: here is a wonderful opportunity to embrace the new, to rearrange everything, turn to a blank notebook page and start sketching designs for a whole new body of work. But so far, it hasn’t turned out that way. The physical work of moving has forced me to grapple with all the objects I own but have put aside: books I read years ago, old clothes (should I keep all these, or get rid of them?), and lots of old pots I haven’t looked at in years. Some are ones I made, and some are ones I bought when I was just starting out. I like buying other potters’ work. I tend to buy pieces that are very different from anything I’d make. Never working in earthenware, for example, I feel a particular curiosity about what it looks like, feels like. I may never satisfy my curiosity first-hand, so, when I see something good in earthenware I buy it if I can.
Unpacking the last boxes last week, I ran across a small, hand-built oval dish I’d made and fired probably in one of my first kiln loads, years ago. Why knows why I kept it—who knows what I had in mind, even, when I was making it. Nevertheless, as I pulled it from the box I saw that it had a shape I happened to be looking for at the moment: this’ll be perfect, I thought, as I carried it across the street to the café that had agreed to display business cards for me. A nice little container. A little funny-looking and not really a good representation of my current work, I thought, but it’ll work.
I stopped back in the café yesterday for a cup of coffee. “We’ve got your business cards right up here,” the cashier said. “But you know, more than the card, the little dish they’re in really says a lot.”
I glanced at it as I dug in my pocket for change. It was probably the first glance I’d really given that piece in a decade. “Uh huh,” I said, heading out the door with my to-go cup. But I thought about it later: a dark, unglazed pancake of clay with a stretched, torn, rim attached around the edge of it, and an unusual ‘X’ made from rolled-out ropes of clay stuck to the bottom of the piece, to give it a little lift up from the tabletop. It was direct and naïve—like grade-school pottery, which happens to be another genre of clay work I buy when I can. This little piece made no display of technical mastery, had no problem with its total absence of geometry, was happy without any glaze, even. I remember that when I first started making pots I resisted using glazes; I wanted to see the clay, and this desire remains as a tension in my current work. These days I’m always waxing off portions of my pots before applying glaze. I was glad to have the piece pointed out to me, and to be given a reason to notice this small piece of my own past.
I’m having the same experience in the studio. I’m confronted with old tools I made and put aside, old buckets of glaze that had been pushed to the back wall of my old studio for years, just sitting there. Stoneware glazes are often very simple mixtures of rock-like ingredients, suspended in water—with few soluble elements, they are very inert. Often they can sit for years and then be stirred up again, applied to the side of a pot, and brought to life. I tend to hold onto projects that I never quite brought to completion, rather than throwing them out. I feel a certain duty to do this, actually—if there’s some idea in there that I don’t understand well enough to realize at the moment, then I don’t have a right to dismiss it, either. Who knows? Someday it could be a breakthrough. It’s not really mine to decide about. I have a bunch of old glazes that are in this category, recipes that I experimented with but never fully perfected. One of these was in a dust-covered bucket, an ash glaze I’d invented at some point and called ‘Lonely at the Top.’ For some reason, apparently, it made sense to me to name a glaze after a Randy Newman song. What did it look like? What was it composed of? Somewhere, in a notebook, the information was there to be re-discovered…
This is what moving has been like for me. Rather than the blithely blank notebook page and the bold sketches of new bodies of work that lie ahead, I seem to be moving backwards. But I’m fine with this. In fact, it’s good, because there’s something back there that I need to re-capture, re-integrate. The studio I left in June was the first one I ever had of my own, and my approach when I first started making pots there was very playful, very naïve and unconcerned. I need to recover this innocence, now. When I first had the chance to work alone with clay my feeling of discovery was total: I wasn’t just discovering things for myself that other people already knew about—it was as though I was the first person, ever, discovering how to make pots. I'm the first person who has ever tried doing this—that was my attitude when I fired the kiln, when I considered what a pot should look like, when I studied how a glaze melts over the surface of a pot and transforms it. That’s the attitude I want to get back to, now. Unless an element of it remains, my work will eventually become repetitive, outward-focused, influenced by expectations that I have of myself and that others have of what a successful potter is supposed to do. As I move into my new studio and carefully put everything in order, I have to be especially careful to leave an open space in which nothing is in order, in which everything I have learned and seen in the last ten years is lost, forgotten, except for my own independence. From there, I can move ahead—I can get to the deepest level with clay. That’s the place I'm always headed toward, but it’s a long journey, along a route that leads sometimes into the future, sometimes into the past.
Theo Helmstadter
Green River Pottery
August 2009
