Darwinian Ghosts

As a contemporary potter I am a scavenger. I sift through the detritus of thousands of years of a ceramic medium searching for the nutritive.

In chasing the shapes I make I start within a tradition. As an apprentice within a long standing apprenticeship tradition I inherit an archetypal and Darwinian range of shapes. These shapes are archetypal in their utility: undeniably and easily recognized as useful by the common eye. These shapes are the strongest of the strong to have carried their merits from the far reaches of ages past across the generations of evolutionary sea to the fertile shores of my present day wheel head.

While I make traditional pots, my pots are also dynamic because they cannot help but contain what I bring to that tradition. To these old and vigorous shapes I bring my father’s jars, my uncles’ and aunt’s pots (both of my father’s brothers and one of my mother’s brothers pursued pottery as well), another aunt’s weaving, another uncle’s building and architecture, my wife’s folk harp music, my mother’s classical guitar playing and short stories, and my grandfather’s mouth harp music and poetry. Every day I spend at the wheel I bring the metal of my own mettle to the crucible of tradition.

“He who has no tribe…”

I worked for Outward Bound this past summer leading a wilderness canoe expedition; part of the Voyageur Outward Bound course area is a wilderness where the Ojibwa tribe used to live. As a part of a restorative justice training we looked at how to approach disciplinary action with youth at risk in a wilderness setting. One goal of Outward Bound and restorative justice is to ensure that a program participant is aware of the impact his behavior has on his expedition members.  Mention was made of the translation of the closest approximation the Ojibwa language has to the word criminal: “one who acts as though he has no tribe.”

During a Christmas visit to my mother and father in law’s home in Maryland, my wife, father in law and I went to see the “Asian Jars” show at the Freer Gallery in DC. The pots themselves stole my breath as did the excitement I was able to share with my wife and father in law about artifacts so closely tied to what I do for a living. The most touching part of the explanatory text that accompanied the exhibit was the idea that mere shipping containers became family heirlooms, even marriage dowries. To attribute so much value to a hand made object brought a shine to my eyes and a lump to my throat. In this country we attribute value to antique objects that are beautiful, yet a large part of the antique market also places value on dusty Coca Cola signs. I understand the appeal of Coca Cola; it is refreshing. I cringe at the notion of a capitalist, caffeinated and carbonated beverage company with a brutal drive for profit as American iconoclast.  There must be a categorically separate icon for our tribal identity. What are the objects that define our culture? What are our tribal heirloom jars?

Carl’s Pot

A dear friend, Carl Curtis, died last November and his family has asked me to make an urn for his ashes. Carl made some pots. Carl led an admirable life. I knew that I wanted, as best I could, to make his urn in the spirit that he led his life.

More important than the outward aesthetic considerations for me was that I wanted to be actively honoring Carl while the pot was on my wheel. It was a wonderful way to work. I paid more attention to my breathing and the sounds around me. I paid attention to how my muscles felt the choreography of the shape progress. I did my best to make pots in the way that I knew Carl would want me to. I took my time even though it was a hectic part of my production cycle. It was a remarkable moment in my shop and I wish I could make pots for Carl every day.

Carl’s pot is an untrimmed, unsigned, full bellied jar the throwing of which fully exploits the aged plasticity of my carefully blended clay body. Its purpose is undeniably utilitarian. The form is inspired by a shape I learned from my apprenticeship called the monkey jar: the narrow opening at the top allows passage of the empty hand but the monkey who does not let go stumps about with a jar stuck on its arm. I realize only upon this writing that we must do this with Carl’s remains: once in the jar we must let go of Carl’s physical presence in our lives. The shape of the pot has deeper roots in medieval Chinese four handled shipping jars. It’s fired with hemlock timbered in the immediate area, and ash and maple thinned from my farm. The glaze I formulated from clay dug on the Curtis farm by Carl’s middle son Ira and I, and mixed and unwashed hardwood ashes from my aunt and uncle’s woodstove. Three generations of Curtis’s live and work on their farm, firing their sap condenser with wood from their land and surrounding area in the production of organic maple syrups and sugars. It is my hope that the process of making this pot is in the same spirit by which Carl lived. Carl’s pot will be buried on the Curtis farm.

What I’ve realized since making Carl’s pot is that every day that I’m in my shop I am haunted by the witnesses of my creative process. These witnesses, whether real or imagined, support me to do my work well when my own energy to do so is flagging. When tempted to cut a corner I imagine having to send the pot to Skudlarek (my friend and mentor during my three year apprenticeship), Thiedeman (my college adviser and mentor), or one of the Unknown that Yanagi writes of. More immediately I imagine what my wife Mariana will think when she gets home from work. Specifically, I imagine Carl’s spirit witnessing the creative process by which a container for his ashes is born. In the moments of breathing life and vitality into these objects I am open to another’s spirit, open to a timeless relationship with and approach to material, and the innovation that comes because no hands are shaped as mine are, no eyes see through the same lenses and no spirit is born of the same chromosomal and cultural community. I am individual without trying. The difficult work is in harmonizing; singing my different note but also sounding beauty in concert with my tribe. My witnesses, near, far, long dead and breathing, real or imagined, are my tribe: may I work as though I belong. May the objects which define our culture honor and be nourished by our cultural roots, our cultural ancestors.

My Father’s Jars

My father is a historian and a history professor- his career as a historian, and most of two years of my childhood- involved his research in Germany looking at old parish registers. From these records he can extrapolate whether a given person died young, died away from home, etc.

As a historian, my father’s work is that of extrapolation. As his son, wanting to see into his soul to better understand my own, I too extrapolate. While there are precious conversations and shared moments that allow me a glimpse of who my father is I cannot simply ask him to look at the parish register that his spirit has kept, marking the birth and growth of his soul.

My father’s first, albeit brief, career course was pottery. His work in that regard slowed down after the loss of his largest body of work, made during a Penland School of Crafts course, in a house fire. It slowed further as he and my mother decided to shape their careers around a family; shortly after I was born my parents left the Quaker boarding school, where my father taught pottery, to pursue post graduate studies. Few of my father’s pots remain. While I have cajoled him into making some pots in recent years I have only traces of his first career path.

            I have one of a run of storage jars that my father made at Penland. It’s one of two that remain to my knowledge. I didn’t think twice about it growing up; it was just another piece of kitchen décor until I had been turning pots myself for a couple years. I developed a ravenous appetite for different ways of making pots and these jars were simply one of the morsels I consumed with my eyes, hand and heart in the exploration of  a new medium, new language, a new world. I made jars in the likeness of this one while I was still in college, but they were always simply a response to the shape of his jars, an effort to improve this heirloom jar through my own innovation, my own self conscious desire to be different. As I grow into adult shoes I fear my similarities to my father less. Included in the kiln’s yield from my second firing was a run of jars that I made trying my best to emulate my father’s jar. I didn’t realize it until I had the clay on the wheel, but the intimacy of shaping of these pots stole my breath. It was a moment in the shop where my awareness focuses so dramatically that I can hear the silence; my own thoughts and pulse seem deafening. My whole being holds its breath to see what courses through my shaking hands. It was not a feeling of competition, though I did face the “what if it’s not as good as my dad’s” issue. There is distinct weight to the knowledge that my father’s hands had followed such a similar path, if only for one run of jars.

As I turned those jars the essence of my father’s soul did not come pouring forth, laid out clearly for me to see. There were no fireworks, or sparks of energy coming from my finger tips as I stepped onto the well trodden path of my folk potter heroes in making the shapes that I inherited from my father. There was, however, peace in the knowledge that my father followed and continues to follow his dreams and passions. There was also peace that came, in that moment of reflection, from the knowledge that I am following mine. The intimacy that I felt like a thickness in the air was one of a dream momentarily shared.

I have vivid memories of my first experience with clay. My mom had just read a version of Genesis in a children’s bible stories collection. It seemed simple enough and within minutes I was excavating the mud from our front yard and smearing it on my best substitute for Adam’s ribs I could find: a milk crate. I don’t remember if I finished that particular project. I do have a younger sister but I suspect the nature of her origins is other than my nascent mud daubing. I do remember my certitude of being able to shape a vessel that would contain a soul.

I do not attempt to make heirloom jars. I simply do what I love. I choose my shapes from my tradition: I share, through this extrapolation, in the prolific post Cardewian aesthetic. The pots I make fall within this tradition yet I also bring to it my family’s rich history of artistic endeavor including my father’s jars. I wear welder’s goggles to check cones. The goggles I have, my uncle bought while studying ceramics at Alfred in the early sixties. I see all of what I do through the lenses colored by the culture of my family.

My jars contain my soul. My jars are my entry in the parish register. My jars are waves of the wake that I leave while plotting course through our collective cultural waters. My jars are my heirloom seed for my future apprentices and my children.

My Grandpa Dan

My grandpa Dan played his mouth harp for the last time at my June wedding in 2002. I think we all knew it was his last tune and his harp music was for all of us a defining characteristic of the parts of our childhood that we shared with him. Two weeks after my wedding he had a stroke from which he has recovered only the most minimal ability to speak and has not played music since. Live mouth harp music will forever evoke images from my wedding.

Dan and (grandma) Rosalie lived on this farm for over fifteen years. I stayed at their house every summer and Christmas vacation as far back as I can remember. I roamed off into their woods with the sense of aimless purpose seen only in children: I built my first house of sticks (the stone foundation and path I laid are still visible to those who know what they’re looking at.) I whiled away hours “at work” in those woods. I’ve since come to the other end of those woods where I’ve helped my uncle to build my house and workshop. I still head off into those woods to thin the hardwoods for kiln fuel, and to dig clay.

Dan’s last visit to the farm included a brief tour of my kiln shed and kiln foundation, the shell of my work shop and the interior of the new house that my then fiancée and I moved into one week before the wedding Dan was there to celebrate. Dan has not seen my kiln; only pictures. I do not expect any significant further recovery or any other visits to the farm.

Last week I visited Dan. I brought a pitcher (a six pound North Devon style with an unglazed exterior) to leave in his. Dan can still understand all that’s said to him as well as he always could, though at present, and with great effort, he can utter only one or two words. He held my pitcher in both hands and uttered one word:

“Jug.”

As a culture we are losing touch with archetypes. A young customer came into my showroom and picked up one of my simpler, straight sided coffee mugs and asked innocently: “What would you use this for?” “Coffee,” I replied. “Oh, it’s a mug!” The archetypes are not entirely lost but they are shifting such that the word mug means: standard dimension oval handled, company logo imprinted industrial ware.  More disturbing is the shift in the meaning of the words potter, pottery, or artist that implied to my customer that whatever the meaning or use of my work it was beyond his comprehension. He recognized and named the shape but only after I guided him away from pretension of higher meaning.

 Is there a higher function than bringing quiet beauty to a ritual object that for many holds the privilege of the first caress of the lips, the first utensil held by the hand each morning? My mugs are incomplete until the moment of that first hot coffee kiss. The intimacy of hundreds of such moments is lost when a work is distanced by any assumption that the ideas involved in art are beyond common understanding.

On the way to see Dan I stopped at a gas station to fill up a mug I’d made with coffee. An older woman who rang me up commented, “That’s a nice mug. Did you make that? You did? That’s great. It’s got that old fashioned look to it.”  My mug is the still recognizable “old mug” archetype.

Straight forward, utilitarian shapes are evocative iconoclasts. In working off of these archetypes I draw from a recognizable cultural taproot that affords me instant connection with a collective eye still sensitive to ancient shapes. I treasure the defining characteristic of my work that renders it accessible to my grandpa Dan. That same characteristic leaves my work accessible by definition to a still significant demographic of our culture.

Though struggling with Parkinson’s, the ensuing fogginess imparted by Parkinson’s medication and the limitations imposed on him by a stroke, Dan was still able to recognize the archetype I invoked. Without any prompting from me other than the piece I put in his outstretched hands, he not only recognized but also named the shape and its origin. The American “jug” is the English “bottle”; “jug” in England refers to our pitcher. Whether or not Dan knew of my piece’s roots in North Devon, he clearly chose the English derivation of the archetypal shape’s name.

Dan died within a couple weeks of the writing of this section. My aunt, who was present at the moment of death, told me that the first item my grandmother Rosalie removed from Dan’s room was the “jug” which I had left with Dan during that visit.

Politics

My culture is inextricably woven into a capitalist economy; the same economy that winds its tentacles around the throat of the politician. What I do with my money is as much a political statement as how I vote. The business I run, “retail pottery sales”, is based on an unusual subset of bottom lines that extend beyond the traditional overarching goal of financial profit. As such it is my aim to be politically expressive with the work I do.

Firstly, I acknowledge that I am not entirely removed from this economy. I depend on petroleum powered deliveries of clay, wood and building materials. My shop is heated with oil (though it is a super insulated radiant slab and as such is dramatically more efficient than many shops I’ve seen). Further, my pots are luxury items despite their being priced at the reasonable end of market value. I have limited my audience by definition, much in the same way that organic meats, grains and produce are aimed at a niche market.

In looking at the people I do reach I imagine what they see:

I make pots for me first. I do my work because I love my work. I even love the janitorial end of my work: washing the floor of my shop, cleaning out my kiln after a firing, scrubbing kiln furniture, mixing and pugging clay. I do not do my work because it makes me lots of money.

I make pots for my customers. If a pot is flawed or rendered less usable by some miscalculation, I charge less for it. On the whole I keep my prices low enough that my customers feel comfortable using the pots without dramatic fear of chipping them. I am able to do this in large part because of my training within a prolific tradition. I can make high quality work in large volume. My kiln holds up to 1500 pieces per firing. I sell more, lower priced pieces. As a result I’m able to make a decent living and price my work to use. My customers are part of my tribe.

I sell regionally and eighty percent of my sales are a face to face interaction with the company CEO, line worker and middle management at the factory! My work is relationship incarnate in that I make for use, and my customers use. Yet the relationship extends further in that my potential customer can see the physical manifestation of my dreams and ambitions. Their tour of my kiln, the dust under their feet in my workshop, the smell of curing hemlock, and the fall colors on my farm are a significant portion of what they buy: they take home a coffee mug already full of conversation, nori rolls and quiet farm back drop that I’ve shared with them during their visit to purchase. I have an unusually good customer relations department. 

Finally- my work pays the bills; but my work is not my work unless it has achieved all of the aforementioned “bottom lines” first. As a business model with a “skewed” set of bottom lines, the mission statement I share with my investors is one of hope, faith and vigor. My work is quixotic and Walter Mittyesque valiance in the face of current cultural-economic trends toward faceless, distant and underpaid labor.

“Most Like an Arch…”

I am no more than upright and unset.

It is by falling in and in we make

The all-bearing point, for one another’s sake

In faultless falling, raised by our own weight. 

Excerpt from John Ciardi, “Most Like an Arch This Marriage”

I began gathering materials for my wood fired kiln at Stony Meadow Pottery in the final year of my apprenticeship. While there were some purchases, (used kiln furniture, ceramic fiber insulation, pyrometer probes, mortar supplies) my budget was limited and the bulk of my kiln is built from “free” scavenged material. The lion's share of my scrounging came during a two week work camp in southern Ohio. With the help of some good friends as well as the staff at Cedar Heights Clay Co. in Oak Hill, Ohio I palletized over twenty tons of used firebricks. The brick were salvaged from old kilns used to fire firebrick, so many of the brick at the site had been rendered unusable by exposure to extreme temperature. For every brick I was able to stack for use in my kiln approximately twenty had to be examined and discarded. All in all we picked up close to 80,000 brick to find the 4,000 brick I needed to build this kiln. These two weeks are remarkable as some of the hardest work weeks of my life.

Before my workshop was finished enough to move into, I turned pots in the old barn here on the farm. Making pots in there that first summer was as much an exercise in archaeology as it was an artistic endeavor. Paulus Berensohn and MC Richards made pots here before I was born. Their tools and old glaze materials were everywhere. Every time I measure a lid I see MC written on the calipers. My dad, Uncle Larry, Aunt Laurie and others shared a makeshift studio in that barn with Paulus and MC in the early seventies.  Brick salvaged from their kilns are in the floor and chimney of my kiln.  Some of MC’s ashes were introduced into my kiln at top temperature during my first firing. Though I couldn’t discern a conclusive difference in the surface, I know that minerals that once and still define her physical self are united in an intimate and fiery dance with the pots from the first pull of my plow share.

The kilns that I salvaged my brick from are long gone; entropy’s dissipating force having won in that particular struggle. The brick, now reused, continue their womblike function of providing bounty of harvest. Each brick is now infused with the collective strength of a new arch. The kilns I salvaged cultivated two very different crops. The brick kilns were a piston in the immense engine of early industrial America, providing a central infrastructure to foundries in a time when steel was pavement. The industry provided jobs central to working class America; the kilns’ yield was characterized by a fundamental need for consistency and often grueling physical labor. Paulus and MC’s kilns (I interpolate) fired clay as the conduit channeling a search for poetry and spiritual grace. The nutrients from these crops also feed the seedling of my career.

My work and my kiln fuse old and new into strength: through the falling together of kiln arch, and marriage of new blood into tradition.

Vision

 Mark Skudlarek was raised on a Minnesota farm and is no stranger to early mornings. During the three years that I spent apprenticing in his shop it was not uncommon for me to arrive (early I thought!) at seven thirty to find Skud had been at it since milking time (four). I could not fathom how he managed it.

Paulus recently shared with me a Haystack Mountain School of Crafts monograph that he wrote. He writes in one section about a scientific study concluding that clay releases energy when struck. With my wife away pursuing graduate studies I’m spending time in my shop at odd hours, long hours. I find myself awake at milking time, my body inexplicably energized, my hands tingling in anticipation.

This morning is a full moon and the meadow outside my shop window is lit brightly, but too many wee hours cone peeps have left my night vision weak. My shop lights are all on despite the moon glow in the clear Endless Mountains air. Since my shop is still young many of the lights are still in boxes, waiting patiently to be hung. The space is sparsely lit at present.

In a photography class in college, we squinted at photographs to examine composition without being distracted by subject matter or surface texture. I squint at the dim forms of my predecessors to determine their composition, searching for the nutritive, feeding, searching again. I squint in the predawn fluorescent hum to see what my own work is made of; yearning to see the nature of my own relative worth.

In my journal from college there’s a photocopied picture of Michael Cardew taken late in his life. He is squinting at a pot to which he’s taking a brush. I stepped into the tradition that I share with him full of determination that I would match the greatness of Cardew. I stepped in with trepidation that I would be unequal to that same path. My determination drove me to work rigorously and enthusiastically, egged on by the work ethic of the Minnesota farm boy whose paces I strove to match for those three years.

I approached my work at the wheel armed with this determination, straining at the spinning pot, reaching as hard as I could to raise my shape and to stretch it as far as Skud’s demo pot; those demo pots were my constant Virgil on the apprenticeship mountain. Many lumps turned back into lumps with purgatorial regularity, their heels clipped by the hurdles of over thinning, pot wall torque, inconsistent clay, indecision about detail. I glared vigilantly with scrunched eyes at the point where my shaping rib made contact with my piece, daring it to wobble, slump or plant its bottom-heavy countenance on the board with its rim lower than the previous one. A hard earned lesson I learned toward the end of my tenure that I relearn each time I approach my wheel: keep the eyes wide open the better to see the whole of the shape and the lines that I want my work to settle into. Stages of my shapes require work of my muscles. Clay releases energy, however, and many stages simply require that I be there, that I breathe, behold, and honor what I value. The time I spend at my wheel having relearned this lesson is time where the work does itself.

It’s getting light in the shop now as I see the parts of my pots that were previously shrouded and shadowy (six pound, North Devon style pitchers, light and airy yet pregnant and full). The clay settles itself along the ancient lines more easily in the dawning day as the squint lines around my eyes fade with the stars. I breathe deeply, content with the shape I am taking. I am rising toward the light airy pregnancy that a long life in clay has to offer me. My father’s pottery career, the specifics of Cardew’s and Skudlarek’s legacy to me and MC’s and Carl’s life remain obfuscated, dreamlike and amnesial. Yet in walking through the dark toward their willowy lights and angelic song I have been led here, awake, nourished, and energized by spinning lift.