Meet the Potter
Since childhood, I've been enchanted with the world's medley of color, texture, and sound, and have celebrated a relentless drive to make magic of these things. There is always a project in my hands! The wool and silk of fiber artistry, choral singing, mothering, Waldorf teaching, homesteading, sheep, ponies, puppetry, fiddle, have graced my journey… growing flowers and clawhammer banjo persist! Working with my hands came readily, until I fell into “the” mud! Clay challenged me with things I’d never faced before, and the competence I’d gathered in a lifetime of craftsmanship didn’t translate.
Making pottery marked a chapter change. At first, it was hard for me to harness the skill of throwing and find the feel in my fingertips. I'd never actually experienced the stepping stones of learning in the same way. I noticed the way I collapsed in on myself and leaned toward giving up over and over again. I found a new inner voice, "Yeh! That's hard. Okay... so just do it anyway." It has become an inner mission generalizing into so many opportunities — the experience of facing something truly difficult, pushing aside the inner naysayer, and not giving up.
Pottery catalyzed a transition from social to contemplative work. Social engagement was central to all my former artistry. In pottery I find solitude, it proffers a reset, a renewal in stepping aside from outer life.
Sometimes I make things just because the feel of the clay on the wheel is compelling. I'm captivated by the wonder of the form emerging. I love the simplicity of the angles and curves, and the way they interact with each other. Nature’s gestures are alluring — a crystal’s crisp facets, the swoop of a branch where it leaves the trunk of a tree, or its tips where it reaches toward the sky, or the growing gourd vine’s curls emerging, and how they know to twist and turn and reach higher.
I don't always know what it is that I'm looking for when I make a shape, I just "see" it and it guides my intention. I know when I'm satisfied or when it feels wrong, but there's no specific philosophy backing it. Yet I muse… Maybe I was some sort of artist in a former life and I developed my eye there and maybe I then knew concrete artistic principles that I have since forgotten... Or maybe all artists who strive are reaching for the sun, the way the tendril of a gourd vine does. Maybe it's a biological or spiritual imperative that one cannot resist, or biology and spirituality are one and the same.
And maybe that means that the compelling urge an artist has to create is from the same stream of consciousness that created the Earth to begin with, the one that causes the trees to grow and the sun to shine for them to grow toward.
Circling back to my roots, the adventure continues in the place of my creative beginnings in the Berkshire Hills. Our family home hosts my mud studio, in the room dubbed in childhood as the Star Trek Room. This old artist has come home, with her head still in the stars, but her feet firmly grounded in the mud.
