Sunflower — Green River Pottery

Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun
- WB

Much is said about the cyclical nature of studio work, each step leading to the next & the end leading back to the beginning, you dig clay from the ground so that you can make things, and you make things so you can fill the kiln, and you fire the kiln so you can get the pieces sent out of your studio, making space to make more. You do each step so you can do the next, and you do the last so you can do the first. Again. The potter's wheel naturally leads to making circles, a shape so predictable, so indestructible & repeatable soon all you know is circles, and at night when you look up at the sky the universe itself seems to be just that – just circles, the stars and planets, round shapes repeating each other. Isn't there some way out? Half the time in the studio I do my inescapable cyclical work, making pots out of clay, and the other half of the time I spend thinking of clever ways to break free.

Platter from around 2016, recently received in the mail from Laguna Beach

I was thinking about this the other day as UPS arrived & dropped several big boxes off at the gallery. I stood up from my computer as the door opened with the first box – just set that right here, thanks, I said, pointing to the same spot where the same driver has set boxes down for the last twelve years. I peered at the label – for a moment I had forgotten what this box was and who had sent it.

I have a couple more for you, the driver said, and spun around to return to the truck. The truck always comes by around noon, and I am usually here, and by now the driver & I are kind of friends. He is tall, young, with buzzed black hair and a sense of humor. Thanks, I said as he brought the last box in. All good? He looked at me nervously. He could tell these boxes contained pots – my pots – coming back to me.

Oh. Yes! I said, having just remembered, reading the shipping label. No, this is good. Thank you. All good!

They're not sending their order back? The driver was relieved. He pointed his little electronic notepad at one of the labels and scanned it. I heard the little bleep. As we have become friends over the years he has become slightly deferential, and at the same time slightly protective, son-like.

Nah. It'll be great to see these. They've been at a gallery in Laguna Beach? Now they're closing.

Ah! the driver said.

Right? Kind of amazing that they're following through & actually sending all this back. I don't even remember most of these pots. Cool, I said, standing up. Drive safely! As the driver has become slightly deferential over the years, for my part I've adopted the slight tone of an elder toward him. Be careful out there, I'll say if it's snowing. Don't work too hard, I say to him when the holidays arrive.

I heard his truck drive off and reached for an exacto to zip along the taped corners of the first big box. Twenty minutes later the table in my gallery was filled with a collection of six or eight big pieces from years past, a few from almost ten years ago. In the early spring of twenty-fifteen I remember I made a trip to California, driving a pickup load of new work for several little show & sale events. Wrapping up, rather than driving the leftover pieces all the way back to New Mexico, I spent a couple days hunting for a gallery to consign with, and found one in Laguna Beach. For a while there things were good – they sold pots, I shipped more, they sent checks – and just as I was discussing with them the possibility of coming back out for a meet-the-artist event of some kind, a trunk show, the pandemic hit. I didn't get any checks for some time, and then an email this year – we're closing.

I picked a platter up from the gallery table and looked closely. These pieces were familiar of course, and forgotten, and they had come around again. Like the voice of an old friend you hear on the phone and a phase of your life suddenly returns to you. Back when I made these pots I lived in my gallery, I remembered, holding the platter. No classes back then, no teaching, no studio manager, nobody around and if a car pulled into the gravel gallery lot I knew it was a customer and I would stop the wheel, reach for a towel, dry my hands, and go talk to them. I fired the kiln once a month – I kept to a very strict schedule. The translucent green glaze on the platter in my hands had a slight shadow across it – ah yes, I thought, studying closely. I remember that phase when my celadon used to get that pale olive-green shadow if pieces were too close to the flue. Like this one was.

There were three or four other big platters in the collection, and they each had a square section cut from the middle of them, flipped upside down, and stuck back in. Hmm, I thought. A piece of the underside had become part of the smooth main 'platter' part of the platter, interrupting the open circle, the functional surface. Rough, inexplicable. No wonder these didn't sell. They are cool though. What was on my mind then – what was I doing? Cutting those chunks out of the the circle of the form.

Stoneware bowl with shino glaze 6” x 16”

I picked up a big bowl. An understated rounded rim, a shino glaze splashing around in it, a deep simple circular curve, making the bowl seem like half of something – a hemisphere. Wow, I thought, with fascination, standing there by the gallery table. I used to really be able to throw bowls! This is so good. Can I even still throw this well? While it would be nice to believe that your skill in the studio is linear, that it increases each year so that you are constantly improving, in fact skill is cyclical. Like everything else. You're good for a while, then you can't throw bowls, so you try to forget about them, then one day your skill returns and you can make them better than ever. But only for a while.

I loaded the pots into my truck. I should rephotograph these & do something with them, I thought, driving home, I now live half an hour from the gallery. Pulling into my dirt parking spot back home though, I stopped the truck adjacent to the cinderblock pile that lies by the gate. I have a tendency to drop pottery onto the cinderblocks that I don't want anymore, or that I shouldn't keep. I got out of the truck & skidded the three boxes of Laguna Beach pots to the tailgate, and one by one dropped most of them onto the cinderblocks, seeing each piece fracture, its circle broken. That felt good. True, your work circles around, it moves like the sun through the zodiac. Actually the sun may seem perfectly round and fixed but it'll just last a while that way, then become a swath of dust, then its remnants will reform later into another sun. Clay of course does this too, recreating itself in an endless circle, plunging into the earth to become liquid, then coming out as rock, then forming the landscape, maybe a mountaintop, then weathering away into clay again. A much bigger circle than mine or my studio's. Maybe next time I see the UPS driver I'll ask do you ever get sick of your route? Driving the same loop each day, delivering the same boxes to the same addresses?

He will look at me with filial concern, and then laugh, holding his electronic notepad to scan another box.