Category: rough ideas

When I talk about my work I often use analogies inspired by seeds and gardens. Today as I dug through photographs of myself while pregnant to share with my daughter — who is due to have her baby a day before her own birthday — I thought more about roots. I came across so many images of Warren and I building our house, studio and kilns. We have collaborated to bring up our child, fire our kilns, exhibit our work and dig our roots. The land was pasture when we bought it. We have planted trees and flowers, vines, vegetables and ideas. It took me a long time to feel like Virginia was my home. Many cycles of the seasons have turned their heads. I can look back to see how we have grown our roots and admire the passing summer and welcome the fall.

As I dig for wild orchids
in the autumn fields,
it is the deeply-bedded root
that I desire,
not the flower.

-Izumi Shikibu

I love the momentum of making pots for the wood kiln– a long cycle of throwing and building and imagining how each piece will fill the organic space of the kiln. At the end when I have to quit I feel as if I have scraps of ideas that roll around my brain like incomplete poems. It’s always hard to say, “ok this is it, no more for this cycle.” There is excitement for the firing but a wave of sadness for the unmade.

& then there are those scrap poems, the ones too beautiful to finish writing, ones that would bring us too great a sadness if we ever thought they could really end. There are many of those.

-J. Todd Hawkins, from “Hooks Brothers,” in This Geography of Thorns: Blues Poetry from the Mississippi Delta & Beyond, Poetry Society of Texas, 2020.

I try not to repeat myself in a given series either in the pots I photo, or the flowers, or veggies, or quotes. But sometimes I work as if I was touching the undersides of pots. So the plants in the garden and the objects all need to be touched again.

I’d rather be loose fire
Licking the edges of all things but the absolute
Whose murmur retoggles me.
I’d rather be memory, touching the undersides
Of all I ever touched once in the natural world.

-Charles Wright, from Bicoastal Journal, in “Oblivion Banjo,” Farrar, Straus Giroux

I have been looking at a group of bottles on our dining room table, each one from a different firing, each with a different focus on form and surface. On my studio docket today was to make a new series of bottles. I often think about still lives. I remember an interrupted conversation I once had with Gwyn Hanssen Pigot. We were at the Garth Clark Gallery in New York City and I asked her if all the pots in a single still life parade came from the same firing. I wondered if pots ever hung around her studio waiting for the right mates to come along as she composed her parades. Her Australian friend interrupted us–admonishing me as if I didn’t understand how successful Gwyn was–so I never got to return to the conversation. Gwyn was inspired by Morandi’s still lives. When I take photos I often think about his painterly universe of form and structure. I imagine him looking hard at his objects as if any extra effects had been scraped away, as if the emptiness of the canvas was filled through his objects.

Over there’s the ur-photograph,
          Giorgio Morandi, glasses pushed up on his forehead,
Looking hard at four objects—
Two olive oil tins, one wine bottle, one flower vase,
A universe of form and structure.

-Charles Wright, from Looking Around

I often say I feel like making work for the wood kiln is like a collaboration. But I think working with any material is a collaboration. I begin with an intention, a scale, a feeling, a form and sometimes a drawing. The next step is getting the clay to do what I imagined and the question becomes, Does it match my preconception? Today I had tall narrow vases in mind— what I made looks like I was collaborating with Dr Seuss rather than smooth stoneware clay. In the studio there is a moment when acceptance is required— the vases aren’t exactly what I intended but they have a life of their own. They show what wet clay can be like; what gravity can do. These pots moved in a direction I did not expect. It takes courage to respond. The response is what allows the forms to come to life. I react to the shape and remain open to the way it slumps, wobbles, or cracks. I ask how can I help it along so that I realize the idea.

“It’s a collaboration, making a spoon. As it is with making a vessel out of clay or a sculpture out of steel. To impose your will and force, to demand the material do what you want, take the shape you want, bow to your preconceptions for what it should be—it will not work this way. A spoon might exist in the end, but something will be missing from it, and you will feel that lack in your hand when you stir the soup. A humility is required, a willingness, in any moment, to realize, this is moving in a direction I did not anticipate, and the courage to respond to what is coming into being. To ask and attend, what shape is being asking for, how can I help it be that? This is the way we are elevated by the process and in the process.”
–Nina MacLaughlin [Link]

Last night in my dreams I wandered the garden and up the driveway in search of the right words. In real life, before bedtime, one of us walks up the driveway in the dark with the puppy, noticing the sky, the breeze, the feeling of the hills; listening to the geese or sometimes the coyotes or perhaps, just silence. I think of the vases in the image as landscape vases. They hold a flower against the mass of a hill and model the line between land and sky.

“The future tugs on us, as the moon does, come what may. In a face, in a shadow, in the overflow of dream life into real life, in all the indistinct places, come what may, come what may, we wander the night gardens of our minds in search of something we can understand. Let’s speak of what we know, and then we’ll see what we hear in the silence.”

–Nina MacLaughlin, from Flower Moon, Link: The Paris Review

This is the first of the series until June 21st of what I hope to be 21 images, a few recollections and some poems. After so many months of the pandemic I can take aim at this series but feel more uncertain than usual at the start.