Some Things Last Longer

Some things last longer
Than you think they will.

- B.D.

I'm always telling students, and customers, not to worry about breaking ceramic things. Nothing lasts forever, I say with a shrug. Sometimes chips or cracks are beautiful in themselves, or alter a piece in a beautiful way – and sometimes, to have a favorite piece reduced to fragments – well, that makes room for something new. It's good – I'm always saying – to refresh the forms you have in your presence, every day, in the space around you – keeps you from getting too attached or from stopping noticing, and being influenced, by what you encounter all the time.

Easy to say.

Yesterday I had a little lesson in what this is like though – I must have had it coming, must have delivered that little lecture one too many times. I was running late – scurrying around gathering what I needed to head to the pool to swim some laps at the end of the day...towel, I thought, and raced down to grab one. Turning and swinging it over my shoulder I felt the towel hit something – I heard a ceramic clink and in the moment after, half a second during which two cups flew toward the tile floor and then hit it, I had all the time I needed to remember how much I loved those two old cups, and how attached I really was.

I stopped moving - I was no longer in a rush - I looked down. One cup had shattered and the other...is it still whole, did it even break? I picked it up. I gave a gentle squeeze and it made a grinding sound. A crack spiraled through it – invisible till you felt around. I began picking up the toothbrushes & scissors the cups had contained. Then I started picking up the fragments of broken clay.

Two old cups: one a perfunctory earthenware shape thrown on a wheel, with a clear glaze inside and a chalky unglazed exterior. A rough, crumbly, not-very-easy-to use handle. The other cup handleless, a hardened, formless, proto-cup that had never really been elaborated or fully realized, its surface deeply rutted by a wooden tool wrapped in rope. I still have that tool in the studio, in a box somewhere. This second cup I remember making by taking a ball of clay, poking a stick through it, and rolling till a rough uneven cylinder had formed by itself – then smushing a cookie of clay onto one end to close it, then whacking the resulting 'cup' with the rope-covered tool. It was the glaze that made me treasure this piece – it has held a toothbrush for the last fifteen or twenty years. A dark tight coating smooths out the ruts a little – and in some of them, when the glaze pools and gets just a little thicker, a cool stone-white depth. This was among the first glazes I tried to formulate myself – a mixture of porcelain and wood ash and feldspar. I took the piece from the kiln and shrugged – hmm, I thought. Kind of black and, uh, kind of white too.

It was weeks later that I picked the little cup up again and thought wait...this is good, this glaze. What formula was that again? And will I ever be able to reproduce this effect?

I spent several years trying and finally got close. Unlike the rope-covered tool, the bucket of glaze that I inadvertently created and then spent years re-creating has a prominent place on the studio floor, its bucket proudly in the lineup of glaze buckets I rely on, and trust, and reach for again and again. The little cup – it's a reminder of those first naive days of clay, and firing, and glaze-formulating.

The other cup, the earthenware one, I made during a Don Reitz workshop. Back when I started I idolized Don Reitz – the big muscular slabs, the spontaneous hard-working way they came together. There is always a slight sense of challenge to his work – a slight I-made-it-and-you-can-take-it-or-leave-it feeling. That was what I admired – that's how I wanted to be.