Galisteo
As the air cools and the days decline I always feel the need to get out & ramble - to see the land & the empty space while it is still accessible before winter. It's great to go see the changing aspen leaves in the mountains, sure - for some reason though I've been drawn the last few weeks to wide-open desolate places - empty expanses, from where you can see a hundred miles or more. It is an invigorating time of the year.
Conveniently, I need to visit these places anyway because in a couple of these spots at least I collect clay that I will want to use all year long back in the studio - now's the time to get a last load before the ice & snow.
Here's a spot I first visited about eighteen years ago. I trekked back to it, pleased to see it's still there, unchanged - eighteen years isn't very long in a place like this, fortunately - and spent some time looking before bagging up as much clay as I could carry.
This is a fine-grained, sticky, iron-rich clay. In the past I have added a lot of flux to it - wood ash or calcium carbonate - causing it to melt into a beautiful glass that covers the ceramic ware beneath it - a glaze.
This time, for whatever reason, I was like what would happen if I tried to throw some of this? As I centered, I had to pull a few rocks out.
It really throws beautifully. There is really something about throwing clay that's right out of the ground - six hours before this picture was snapped this clay was getting covered in raccoon tracks down along the Chama River - it's as though the earth itself, as it turns, is doing the work for you, which it is - it is the substance of the clay, especially in a form like this one, that is the source of beauty. As maker, you're kind of along for the ride.
