This Month at Green River Pottery: May 2008
Working Together
I found a bin of clay I’d dug in Abiquiu a few years ago, mixed in a little fire clay and threw a vase and a platter with it, just to see what would happen. I had done a few tests on this clay when I first dug it, and I remembered that it fired to stoneware temperature without melting, slumping, or bloating. I had suspended further tests, back then, because my kiln was having trouble and I was loosing work due to other problems—best to eliminate any variables I could from my production process, I thought, and I put the Abiquiu clay aside.
The bin sat for a couple years behind my kiln shed, gathering leaves, rainwater, snow, getting baked in the sun. All of these things are good for clay, from a potter’s perspective—clay is just fine-grained slippery dirt, after all, and it just gets finer and more slippery with time, with the freezing and thawing and microbial growth that occur when it’s left alone. The clay threw okay on the wheel, a little punky-feeling but very black, and with a satisfying dirt smell. Like an old basement, when I pulled a cylinder up and stuck my nose into the darkness at the center. The smell of earth, the smell of time.
This is a central part of my inspiration as a potter, this feeling for clay as an old, fundamental material. A material beyond the range of what a person could come up with as a creative starting point—clay is something you have to find, or be given, almost. I always have the feeling, in the studio, that while I’m contributing something toward the beauty of my pots, the earth is contributing something too. We’re working together, and only for that reason can I hope to achieve something beyond myself, beyond my imagination, my ingenuity. The best pots surpass the potter; their beauty connects to a source more fundamental, elemental. Older.
I was eager to see how these pieces turned out after I’d glazed and fired them. The forms were good; the glazes fit well; the clay itself had an open, slightly spongy lightness, but I think I can tighten it up with a little feldspar and flint. That fundamental quality I can't add, though, was already there—that earthy, primordial presence I’m always after—and when I put the pieces out for display in the gallery, people reached for them with special interest. Their hands naturally ventured out to touch them, to pick them up.
