Artist Talk
I-40, westbound, the vibrant & fragrant mesquites on either side of the highway, populating the Mojave Desert. Up ahead, the Colorado River and the California border - behind, in the bed of the truck that is, eight giant bins of new stoneware ceramics.
1:00pm March 18 - Los Angeles. A potter talks about his work:
Well, thanks everyone for being here. I'll try to keep this kind of brief – I'll talk about my work, and about what it's like for me to make my work, and then if anybody has questions I'd like to try to answer those too. I want to really specifically thank, again, Tony, for making this weekend happen. Tony and I have been friends for about eight years now, and have done a few - I think three - events like this over the past eight or so years - every time I visit and we get together Tony always asks: what's new with your work? What has changed?
I always have to stop and think for a second, because the way I think about being an artist, and maybe this is true for studio artists especially, and really especially for potters - is that what it's about is just showing up - just keeping on, getting yourself to the studio. The ones who make it are the people who are so stubborn they just keep getting back to the studio and picking up the thread from the day before, over and over again. There's even a certain amount of freedom in thinking about being an artist in this way because in a way you stop thinking – you don't analyze or critique – you focus on protecting your practice and pushing the work forward, little by little, seeing things a little further along, day by day. I've always loved the kind of escape from your own self that the studio provides – I've needed it – and identifying that need was the way that i - reluctantly - first began to identify myself as an artist. It just made sense - trying to build a life around a creative practice.
And then there's Tony's question. Which really goes to the whole opposite way of looking at being an artist. What's new – where are you going with your work – how is it evolving? The danger, I think especially for potters, who usually work prolifically, is to start repeating yourself, and get in a rut of making the same thing again and again. You do have to have a direction. You have to have some perspective – that's, for me, a lot of what this weekend is about, getting out of the studio and regaining that – and you have to be going somewhere. These days, as I work along busily day after day, I try to keep Tony's question in the back of my mind. I should have an answer! And hopefully in a moment I'll get to some specific answers about what's new with my work at the moment.
Meanwhile, I've brought along a couple of the basic materials I use to make the pots – this is clay that I dig up in Abiquiu, which is not far from my studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and in this other little bowl, you can see, is wood ash, just straight out of someone's woodstove. I spend a certain amount of time processing these materials – sifting, sorting, straining out. Sometimes I go a few months with a bunch of big bins sitting around needing to be processed, and kind of procrastinating – then as soon as I get to it I think geez, this is kind of fun. Meditative, and kind of mindlessly relaxing, passing all this clay through a screen to remove rocks – kind of like being in a fairy tale where someone has to separate rice grains from beans or something. Who was it in the Greek myth who has to do that – and the birds come down to help? Or was it ants? Anybody remember? Somehow, she gets help – and there's a level of that for me, really, getting these materials straight out of the ground – I'm kind of invoking help from a source, and from a power, that's greater than what I have. Seems like just kind of a formless, grainy, black powder here, the clay in this bowl - but. Feels exciting too. Filled with potential.
The wood ash becomes a key ingredient in some of the glazes I use - turns out it contains a lot of the minerals that you need to form this thin, melting, layer of glass that covers the form - this glaze. Wood ash was one of the very earliest materials used to form glazes. A lot of the look of my work comes from my approach of very direct engagement wiht the materials of making it - of course you can just buy clay instead of processing your own, now, and you don't have to start from scratch, so to speak, with your glaze formulations - but I get into all that, and I want to reveal the kind of textures and very earthy nature of the clay, tearing it, cutting in to reveal the underlying material, wanting to let the glazes move and drip.
Of course none of these are original ideas and I'm working within a very defined tradition of American studio potters – we're all very inspired by certain Asian approaches to clay – for me, in particular, some Korean and Japanese approaches. A lot of Americans study these pots, their apparent simplicity, the rapid, spontaneous, making, and the placing of these pots squarely in the daily, the regular, living of life. It's almost a cliche now to point out in the Asian aesthetic the restraint, and the emphasis on form over surface - you do see this as a goal of my pieces here though – I'm thinking shape, and overall feel, and trying to keep surfaces from becoming something you notice in themselves - you're supposed to be not looking at them so much as looking through, seeing what's underneath.
I'm also trying for a kind of beauty in my work that's not so much of the moment but that might endure over time. That sounds like a contradiction, of course, given that I'm working rapidly, leaving a lot of artifacts of the making process, wanting spontaneity and wanting the piece itself to be a kind of record of the event of making – I think it's not a contradiction, actually, but it is a paradox. I'm hoping you can live with one of these pieces every day for five years, or fifty or five hundred years, and still come back to see it revealing itself in a new way – still encounter it for the first time. I go to museums and see thousand year-old Korean celadon vases that look like they just came out of the kiln yesterday. They're not so much in time, or from a specific time, as being about time itself – and I'd say that really time is part of my aesthetic – I'm using a sense of time and invoking a feeling of age to design my pieces in a way.
I was listening to a podcast as I was driving out here on I-40 – it was Terri Gross on Fresh Air interviewing Adam Alter about technology, and how it is so addictive, each new version of World of Warcraft coming out, you have to keep up with it, and the new Ipad – these products are specifically designed to keep you hooked in, to keep you wanting what's next, the way Netflix gets you to binge-watch – they make it impossible to stop. Alter suggests an antidote to addictive technology is to spend an hour a day doing something where you can't tell what year it is. So like if you're at a cafe on your Ipad Mini 4 or whatever, you know exactly when that technology is from – it locates you. Now I'm on the third season of Game of Thrones, say. But if you're just walking down the street looking at the trees, or working in your garden, or knitting – weeding – well, it could be a hundred years ago and the scene would still be the same. I was driving along and I thought: oh! Ah-ha. That's something I want my work to do - to kind of lift you of out time, and to be a kind of antidote - to let you float.
