As I photograph pots I remember the road to making. The seeds of ideas, the landscape I was traveling through, or the gears that were churning in my imagination. Each material step of making reveals which choice I should make. Then the firing provides new leaps of faith--the promise of ash or flashing, the heat that may encourage shape shifting. Yet as I photograph the object it is as if the form has always been here.
When I began making these plates I was thinking of the history and feeling of industry motivated by the gears and wheels left around the Archie Bray facility. It was an inside-out quality of shape, but what I kept coming back to was the clay itself. The fields, the hillsides, the earth, the roads we travel are in fact among the only choices we can make.
When I began making these plates I was thinking of the history and feeling of industry motivated by the gears and wheels left around the Archie Bray facility. It was an inside-out quality of shape, but what I kept coming back to was the clay itself. The fields, the hillsides, the earth, the roads we travel are in fact among the only choices we can make.
Santiago
The road seen, then not seen, the hillsidehiding then revealing the way you should take,
the road dropping away from you as if leaving you
to walk on thin air, then catching you, holding you up,
when you thought you would fall,
and the way forward always in the end
the way that you followed, the way that carried you
into your future, that brought you to this place,
no matter that it sometimes took your promise from you,
no matter that it had to break your heart along the way:
the sense of having walked from far inside yourself
out into the revelation, to have risked yourself
for something that seemed to stand both inside you
and far beyond you, that called you back
to the only road in the end you could follow [...]
-- David Whyte, from Pilgrim, © 2012, Many Rivers Press
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