Who really thinks about a coffee cup or a pitcher? Why not consider the future impact of the shifting demographics of bird species within North America? One reason for thinking about a cup is that - I use one every day. I even have favorite cups that, like my friends, are missed when I am out traveling or that I get tired of when I see them too often. I also have cups from friends that I miss dearly, long since departed. These cups I treasure.
From making and studying pottery I’ve learned a lot about humans, their art and cultures, fire, geology, and even beauty. Pottery making is like being a mad scientist and an artist at the same time. Potters learn to dig up some gooey mud, shape it into usable objects, and then subject these objects to incredible, volcano-like heat. When potters are successful the results are beyond any previously held expectations of obtainable beauty. You literally hold these things in your hand and can’t believe that you have made them. You feel like a god! When it goes bad… kilns explode, buildings burn down, pots melt into pools of glass, and hands are sliced open; making pots feels like chasing dragons.
I got into pottery almost fifty years ago because, like most teenagers, I wanted to make a bong. I saw a guy throwing a pot on a wheel and thought “How hard can that be?” and “Wow, I could make a bong!” Fifty years later and I’m still at it, although now I make hundreds of pots and sculptures every year (but never really made that bong!). Don’t get me wrong, it's just that my tastes have changed. Like anything else, the more that you get into pottery, the more that it opens up doors to other things. Sometimes those things are magical…
Once, when on a canoe trip, as we passed an old defunct 1800s pottery factory I said to my friend Pat “Old guys have told me that the potters here used to throw some of the chipped or flawed pots from the kilns here into the river and that they sometimes wash up in floods and high water. So keep your eyes peeled for any big chips or pieces washed up along the banks” Scanning the river's edge, Pat instantly pointed and replied, “What, like that one stuck in the tree root right there?” We paddled over and there it was. A stoneware jar decorated in cobalt blue with the name of a store and “Turtle Creek, Penna.” stenciled in the glaze. You could see tiny fingerprints still visible on the clay bottom of the pot and I said “Whoever handled this when it was made was ... so small…?” Pat shook his head and replied “Child labor back in those days”. I thought about that kid whose fingerprints were fossilized in the fired clay and how they had grown up and had their own kids and lives back before we were even born. And how they probably threw this pot into the river never thinking of it as a time capsule, a literal message in a bottle sent through time to speak to us, as all pottery does. You just have to know how to read it and listen.
That’s just one cool thing about pottery, it never goes away. Unlike wood or bone or even metal, pottery does not rust or decay. Archeologists read the grocery shopping lists of ancient Sumerians on fired clay tablets. You can drink your beer from medieval tankards made for kings of old, eat your Wheaties from a Song dynasty bowl, or possibly, make your own fossils for the future. Pottery is here to stay and if it’s interesting or beautiful people will probably treasure it and pass it along through time to enchant those who are not yet born.
Unlike today’s styrofoam cup, a humble pottery mug involves the human hand. Its shape delicately crafted by the potter. Its handle shaped into a graceful curve balanced just so and calculated to comfortably loop over human fingers. The glaze applied, typically over brushwork stylized to fit the mug's shape and bring further interest to the depth created by the glass skin. All this has been carefully crafted only to be tested in the fiery heat of the kiln. A gamble no doubt as many pots crack and deform in this intense passage through hell. Yet those that live, to the potter, are almost as beautiful as children to their mothers. They embody all of the work and toil of their making but also carry the beauty of their own creation and often surprise us with their individuality.
Occasionally I have come across a fine pot sitting in someone’s house and in picking it up I have suddenly felt that odd tingle of familiarity- family. This is the point at which I spot my signature or stamp on the pot and realize that the work is from my own hand, and though years have passed and many changes have taken place…. I remember this pot, this time in my life, and who I was then, all with the help of this thread, this lifeline, pottery.
