Slide talk
On Sunday March 13 I was fortunate to have been invited to present my work & some current thoughts about it to a group of photographers doing a weekend workshop of their own - Taproot.
Just for my own archive I’ll post the slide talk here. Below the images is the text that I’d jotted down to say while the images went past - of course, in the moment, I did not stick very closely to this.
Slide show notes
March 2022
I intro
Thank you everybody for joining this talk & thank you Eddie for the invitation to join Taproot. I'm going to show some recent images of my work, and mention a few recent ideas about what I'm doing. Some of my ideas about clay are quite fixed & endure, and others change quite a bit with time, and with work. You're never in the same place for long, in the studio – it really is a journey. I like to let that happen & feel that, you know, as an artist, I have a license to change my mind. I'm allowed to contradict myself – actually it's important to do that fairly often I think. So, what I'll say today goes for now, and if you ask me again in a few months, or next year, I might have totally changed my mind about some of this.
I'm also going to include some images of my life going on in the background, or at least a couple parts of my life that support and inform my life in the studio. Most artists I know have a parallel passion alongside their main gig – they play an instrument, or they do a sport, that apparently has nothing to do with their art but maybe, in the background, kind of might make the journey possible in a way.
You see I have a lot of pictures of rivers & kayaks here, and I know this is kind of tiresome because I'm supposed to be showing images of pottery & talking about art...somehow these images ended up at the top of the pile as I began sorting out & pulling pictures for a slide show last week.
Paddling is the overall metaphor I have for my life in the studio. Paddling is also a ritual, I have been doing it for many years, a river trip has a familiar rhythm, just as the studio does, a familiar way the day goes. Also there's the adventure, and the danger, and the hope that things go well – you know they don't always go well. Sometimes in the studio too you end up in a situation, you end up swimming for shore.
If you're familiar with the Rio Grande north of Santa Fe at all you may know this – the famous Sleeping Beauty wave – people come from far away for this wave, when the water level is right you can surf on it, you can get your boat out on it & just skate around on that glassy curve. I'd say I have probably learned more about being an artist, and certainly more about throwing pots at the wheel, by spending hours surfing this wave, than by anything else I've done.
I actually keep all my boats in my clay studio where I can see them – hanging along the rafters here. Convenient for easy departure – important for another reason too. I'll be throwing pots on a long day, and I glance up at these little sharp-edged plastic forms. These boats aren't meant to float gently down the middle of the river, they're made so that you can carve & spin in them, kind of immerse yourself in the river as you paddle along through it – you become one with the waves, and the swirling eddies, and you get totally wet of course & spend a lot of time upside down, in a little boat like this. You get a feeling for the power of the river – you're just little, and you have a little short paddle, and the waves sometimes are huge. The sound is deafening, when you're in the middle of a rapid – you can't see, or hear, anything else except water.
As an artist, you know, you're hoping to join your own minor powers to something greater – you're hoping to be smiled on & to sync up with a resource that's bigger than you & that can help you & take you farther. That's what surfing feels like – you're borrowing a little of the power of the river. Or you're lending yourself to it. You think of the potters who went before you, & the profound ceramics that were made thousands of years ago – you want to be carried along by that. You want to join with that power.
II digging clay
So, along with water, and rivers, and the power of the flow of the river, I'd say another creative source I'm always wanting to connect with is the earth itself – going to get clay is another ritual that informs my work, it's a return and a beginning, a way of confirming that my work relates to these greater & more powerful earth forces – that I'm collaborating, again, with powers much greater than mine.
Here in Abiquiu, in the high desert, among these great rock formations & sedimentary layers there is such a great feeling of time, these fabulous deposits of sand & gravel & clay that were once ocean bottom, you feel the decomposition & crumbling as a kind of creation itself, this clay will be pressed back together to form rock later, it'll be sent back under the earth to become molten & come out again – kind of what I plan to do with it on a my own tiny scale.
Also on a more practical level, as I dig the clay that I use for pots I confirm that my work is my own & make it more personal, more unique, not that that is a goal itself. In fact in a way I'm trying to make my work the opposite of unique, I'm trying to conform my studio practice to something very traditional, I'm wanting to work in an old way. I want to get fully on board with the same process everybody else, when they've been a potter, has been undertaking for thousands of years.
I remember visiting an art museum in Shanghai a few years ago, you've probably been there, they had re-created a typical clay studio that might have been up & running back in the Han Dynasty – I stood there observing the exhibit, and there was all the same stuff I see in my own studio, the buckets, the piles of rocks that have been sifted out of clay, the screens you use to do the sifting, the brushes, the wheel. That made me feel good – that made me feel like I'm on the right track. I dig clay to connect my work more personally to the earth, but also to make it more kind of anonymously part of the same process all potters have used. Sometimes when I'm working away, alone in my own studio, I feel the presence of the old potters who have gone before. They're all kind of there, in the ever-present state of the studio – the kind of timeless moment you feel on a good day working.
III ash bowl
Here's a recent bowl out of the kiln not too long ago. There are a lot of typical things going on in this that you can recognize – the form is wheel thrown, and then I always have the urge, while the clay is still wet, and totally smooth & serene, to go back in & dig it up a little, abrading & kind of opening up that texture under the rim, and then flipping the tool around and trailing the handle in the side of the bowl as the wheel turns, making that kind of track that the glaze can interact with, later, as the piece is fired – the glaze is a translucent thin mixture actually of another kind of clay that I dig not far from the studio, mixed with a flux to melt it & get it to flow once the kiln is up around two thousand degrees or so. You see the glaze interacting with the surface, kind of pooling & dripping, & you see that the glaze formed a drip that headed for the foot of the bowl but stopped just in time – another twenty minutes of firing & the drip would have hit the kiln shelf, and fused everything together & ruined the piece. I love that.
I love the kind of almostness of this bowl. A good pot – maybe this is true in photography too – suggests something, or almost touches something, but holds back, leaving a bit of unknown, and unseen. The very best pots – I don't know if this bowl can do it – reach into the space around them, so that the invisible or immaterial dimension of the bowl, the suggested or unsaid, really becomes the best part. Sometimes you don't know that's happening, but you still respond to it that way. The very best pieces of art, you don't know why you like them, or what's so great about them. It's an invisible, immaterial, thing about them that they're not even directly saying – but they might.
I make a lot of work for daily use, pieces that are meant to clutter up the kitchen, and I make a lot of pieces that are more pure, just made in the pursuit of beauty itself. I like that clay blurs the distinction – supposedly in art if you can use something to drink tea out of then it can't be very valuable as a thing of beauty, or as an artistic statement. With clay, if you're making something that's going to get used all the time, that doesn't subtract beauty away from it.
This tall lidded jar kind of reminds me of my obsession with being able to have contrast, and even contradiction. My work wants to put together the rough and the smooth, glazed & unglazed, the refined quiet regions of a piece along with spontaneous & ragged. The material & the immaterial, the seen and the unseen. I do see that as kind of the highest attainment for a ceramic form, its ability to reach into the unseen realm.
IV ash bowl broken rim
Here is another really recent bowl, this just came out of the kiln a few weeks back, you see a lot going on here as with these other pieces about cutting, disassembling, re-building. The potter's wheel makes circles – everything is a circle when it comes off it & that gets to be a confinement. The circle is so tight, so final, with no way in. My temptation here is to interrupt that, to open that, to create space. Cutting the rim free, darting the form & reassembling, suddenly there is a new configuration & I don't quite know how that will go. I work rapidly, trying not to think.
Uncertainty is an important attribute for my creative journey. It's like if you knew, as you dragged your boat to the water at the start of a run, exactly how things would go on that day you probably wouldn't bother going – you'd just stay home. What you want, each time you head for the river, even if it's the same river you've been paddling year after year, is to discover something – to have something happen that has never happened before.
These last pieces, these pitchers, are also very recent work & I haven't actually made my mind up about them yet. I'm experimenting with these pouring vessels, seeing how they work, you don't know really until you make them, and even now – I guess I don't quite know yet what I think. Sometimes you really know, or you think you know – you're like this piece is great! Then years later you look at it & it's like hmm...maybe that was just a conceit. Another piece comes out of the kiln & you're thinking ah...what? Does this work? Then later – here's what I'm hoping is going to happen this time – you're like oh, how fantastic, these pitchers are wonderful. I'm not there yet.
Not everything you make works, and you can't expect it all to work. Some of the river trips you go on are horrible, but you can't just stay home, you can't wait for perfect conditions, you go because you need to go, and if the water is too high, or too low, or it's raining – well, it's not going to be the last river trip. You have to keep moving.
V student work
I really like the work made by beginning potters, I see a lot happening with these pieces, and take them very seriously. In a class, when one person makes a piece that is very authentic & true that has an effect on the class as a whole – it's like a new person just entered the room. Even for people making their very first pieces, you can see the work moving through them, forms that are kind of innate, forms that are personal representations of ideals of forms, archetypes of forms, and I really feel the responsibility of having created a space where that can happen. I'm grateful to students who are willing to enter it. Also I find it amusing & endlessly absorbing how each individual person has this innate sense of form, and a literal particular form kind of hard-wired in for them, almost like a symbol of their personality – as they begin working, you see this form emerge immediately. For one person an open bowl, for another person a closing, containing, vessel form. Before they have learned any technique at all – while they are totally innocent as a potter this appears. So the first pieces people make are very significant, and as I work with a lot of students, people just beginning their creative journey, I always say to them to keep their first pieces – don't give them all away. You know, there is, then, that great paradox of everybody's creative journey – no sooner do you learn a little technique and get 'good' at what you're doing then you're trying to get back to that state of innocence, you're trying to unlearn what you know, and release the expectations you put on your own work, so that you can make something true & authentic again.
I spend a lot of time teaching, and the years I spent alone in the studio inform that time, fifteen years alone with the clay give me a bearing, and a conversation that I now can have with students. These days as I do spend more time teaching I'm aware that the classes and the students I have also inform my solo time – being by myself in the studio is a solace, and the studio is a refuge, and the privacy of my own clay journey is even more valuable. The two compete with each other to some extent – I need time alone to work, and then the classes take a lot of time too – these days I'm aware also of how much each informs the other. The teaching I do floats on all that time alone I've spent with clay, and then the alone time & the private creative journey time are supported & floated by the teaching I do. So, opposites again, and the quest to hold both sides, and the energy each gives the other.
Conclusion cottonwoods
So as I was getting the images together for this talk I kept dumping pictures of cottonwoods in, and I kept shuffling them all to the end here, for whatever reason. Santa Fe and Albuquerque are about an hour apart, and if I'm going to the airport, or buying clay supplies, or picking up an out of town guest, I drive to Albuquerque. I always stop at this one spot in Algodones to visit this grove of cottonwoods, and I always take pictures. I have a trove of hundreds of pictures of these same trees.
So in the spirit of contradicting myself as often as possible another thought I had as I finished pulling slides to use for today's talk is that life in the studio isn't like a river trip at all, because there's no start and no end. A river is linear. It's also on a map – you know where it's going. In fact in the studio there is no top & bottom, no start & finish, no progression you can trace in your work, through the years, from good to better. Or not much on one, not one you can rely on. Your best pieces might have come in the first year. It's never about technique or proficiency of course, in art, and it's not like there's an end goal – it's not like you're going to be, someday, okay, I've done enough! I've made enough art and now I'm just going to stop! That would be ridiculous, right?
Instead, I decided, after I'd kind of gotten my whole presentation together here, it feels like revolving around a circle, constantly returning to an ever-changing single moment that I'm always trying to get closer to. In the studio. It is an experience of constant reconnecting, constant returning. The creative journey goes in a circle of course, this is a cliché, but you return again and again, every day, every season, every year, you're always trying to get back to the same point, the physical studio space, and the feeling of connection you have to your work. When I drive to Albuqerque I see these trees season after season, the same trees, and of course they're always the same. I stop, and I take a look. So, this is the creative journey for me. You never really know where you're going, and who knows where you'll be in a year, but this is where I'm at at the moment, I guess, and, thank you so much for looking at all these images & for hearing a bit about my work.