Summer Heat

There's always a lag in the process, a length of time that expands, sometimes to a month or more, between the moment of making & the moment of completion. In studio ceramics. At least in the way I work. This piece was thrown in still-cold February, the time of year when you wear a wool cap when you work & heat up the water to set beside the wheel.

I remember it - I actually threw this piece during a class at Santa Fe Clay, demonstrating for students. "Now, maybe there's something we can do with this rim," I remember saying, reaching for the first tool I could find & dragging it around on the surface - the needle tool - when teaching, you kind of work quickly, exaggerating, emphasizing. You don't think of keeping what you make. But this platter - as I packed up at the end of class - looked too good to recycle.

It sat an extra month on the shelves back in my studio. Last week I finally fired it - a highlight, a favorite piece from June. The undulating pattern, lines merging & crossing at the extremity of the circle, recalls, for me anyway, the mesmerizing grooves of an LP record. The form - because I was exaggerating, probably - has a robust, confident, balance. It is not over-worked. Seems to me that in the studio - and on my favorite records, too - the best & most beautiful is often that which slips through, almost despite the maker - you barely see it out of the corner of your eye. It has a life of its own.

How about this piece? June has gotten hot - the studio door is open - I glance around for uncovered clay & throw a sheet of plastic over, to slow its drying. Everything is easy - and if it's the heat of the kiln that transforms the potter's art & makes it indelible, records it, so to speak - then that same heat feels like it's hanging in the air as I work, now, lurking in the corners. In a good way. The first day of summer is next week. It's hot outside. A piece like this slides out of the kiln & into the gallery - I just see it, out of the corner of my eye.