Good Morning from Alabama

Start buying pottery, I'm always telling students. Start a collection, and keep adding to it. Keep it around, out where you see the pieces everyday, and use them, and catch them out of the corner of your eye when you're doing something else. This way they inform you, you get to know them, you change. They change too.

Just before I started building my first kiln I bought a vase from a neighboring stoneware potter – loose, casual, the kind of form whose throwing on the wheel was more discovery than completion of a thought-out plan. It is light, lively, distorted from the 'correct' geometry it must have had at first — if you didn't center the form pretty well you'd never get it so big and airy before crumpling it, denting it, letting it fall a little. The vase is about knowing what is right – nodding at the expectations of wheel technique before you – and then at the last moment letting go, taking your hand away, to the surprise of anybody watching you too closely. It's a little defiant, a little cheeky in claiming its freedom.

When I can throw a vase like that, I thought, which was the reason I bought this first piece in my collection, then I'll have made it. Then I'll be there. Where I want to be. Probably for any artist there are benchmarks of success — for an author a big book tour, a best-seller. If you're a pianist & write a memoir of your teachers & piano lessons and then get on Fresh Air to talk about it, maybe that is a benchmark.

One of the first places I went to start building my collection of ceramics was Goodwill. I would browse the housewares isle with the toasters, the glassware, the waffle irons & coffee makers & Pyrex. You can find good stoneware pottery there sometimes! And you can find pieces that aren't good but...you buy them. Clunky pieces by beginning potters. Sometimes you can tell the studio a piece was made in by the glaze — oh, you observe. There’s that Blue Jeans glaze they used to have at Santa Fe Clay. Sometimes you find pieces by ‘good’ potters who’ve had their studios going for decades — long enough for the person who bought something from them not be around anymore, maybe, or they’ve moved away, leaving once-loved things off at the thrift store. For whatever reason. Once I found a little mug with a handle, it had that cooling-tower shape, a narrow middle & a rim that opened outward a bit, easy to drink from, a good round negative space behind the handle that invited your fingers – easy to hold. Thick, low, and a field of tiny curlicue circles pressed around the base, filled with cobalt stain. Block letters had also been pressed in the wet clay, spelling out 'Good Morning from Alabama'. I picked the mug up & felt it in my hand. Clunky, I thought. Kind of horrible, but — I need this for my collection. How did it get here from Alabama? I wondered. I like the random sense of fate, of synchronicity, at the thrift store. What is this mug telling me?

For years the Alabama mug held pencils on my kitchen table. I was making breakfast for another potter one morning & she noticed it – what's this? she said dubiously, as we sat there drinking coffee, she is an artist with a keen sense of irony.

Oh! I said. That. Great, right? From Goodwill.

Kind of horrible but — awesome, she said.

I thought for a moment. I had a big collection of ceramics by that time, and more than that, by then I had sold hundreds, thousands maybe, of pieces out of my gallery… someday I'm going to go to Goodwill & find my own work there, I said.

My potter friend laughed with irony. Yes, she said — then you'll know you've really made it.

I think that's true, I said. That'll be, like, a benchmark.

It used to be that I was the only one at my gallery, and if I left (I rarely left) I just closed up, and I'd return to find everything exactly as it was — I'd pick up where I left off. These days, maybe this is another kind of benchmark, one I’m still figuring out, I arrive at the gallery to find maybe some pots were sold while I was gone, or someone stopped by and left a note, or there is a note from someone working on their own work back in the studio — there's only a little soda feldspar left, it might say. These days I put my bag down and feel slightly disoriented. I sit down and turn the computer on rather than putting on my studio shoes & apron as I used to. Last week I walked in and glanced at the desk and there was a little round vase with a note next to it. I peered at it (reaching for my glasses). Brian was in yesterday, it said. He found this at the Salvation Army — left it so you can have it back!

I looked back at the vase. I felt a few emotions at once, and they were all gently floating in that same irony I heard in the voice of my potter friend from that breakfast, ten years back. I laughed. I felt happy to see the vase and I wanted to welcome it back like an old friend — tell me where you've been! I'll find a place for you here in the collection, you don't have to leave again. I held it up. Simple, stolid, with a single line left by a sharp tool falling away from the rim down toward the middle. Clunky, poorly-proportioned, probably something I made in a class or just to use up a lump of clay left on the wheel from some other project, and then I must have decided to put it in the kiln, probably just to fill an empty space on a shelf. The kiln fires better when it’s full. The glaze is good — still, I would never put that out in the gallery now. It’s a vase whose throwing was not really part of a thought-out plan…more of a discovery I guess.

These days I still take down that first vase occasionally, the cheeky one claiming its freedom. I hold it, or set it out on the table during a class to discuss & work from. These days I'm a little tired of the work you do asserting your freedom. Why not just work? The vase, once a beacon of spontaneity, a declaration of what I wanted to be like in the studio, a benchmark, now seems just a little forced – like a great song from an old favorite band that you don't ever listen to much anymore.

I went back to Goodwill last week, and I stopped in at the Salvation Army too. Maybe they have more of my work? Or maybe there’s something else there I’m supposed to find, another stoneware piece for my collection, I scanned the housewares isle eagerly. Something — a reason to change — another benchmark to work toward, far out in the future. There’s always more.