clay, wood and beauty

It was the coldest, bleakest part of this last winter. That was when my right arm was gripped with such intense pain that I had to stop working with the clay. I was not happy! The medical advice was to take a break for a month, but what was I going to do?  It turned out that this was an opportunity to completely rethink my making process. 

All my forms up to this point had been made by honing them into shape using a metal scraper held in my right hand, and it was the tension in doing that that had led to the pain. I loved that process, and I felt that the gradual refinement of the firms over many days was part of what people perceived in them. I thought that, in some way, it was the source of their calmness and what they communicated. So to be deprived of access to that process was a challenge to what I had come to believe the work was about.

But my commitment is not to the outcome of the making process, it is to the process itself – to try to find a rightness in the making process and see what that quality leads to in the finished pieces. Clearly the scraping that I enjoyed was not right for my arm, so could there be a new way of making that would involve less tension and more balance in my body? 

For some reason I had also been reflecting on my early days of recording wildlife sounds which eventually led to my first career in natural history radio. Thinking back to the child who stuck a microphone out of his bedroom window to record the garden bird song I realised how long I have had a fascination with recording the natural world in one way or another. I was thinking how clay also keeps a record of everything that happens to it until it is fired, at which point the story of its making is locked into its form and surface. Maybe thinking of the clay as a recording medium could lead to a new way of working.  And so it did. 

I think there’s a great affinity between ceramics and wood. I treated myself after a recent commission to this beautiful piece by local potter, Paul Bradley.  It’s very refined and yet has a natural coarseness to the surface and obviously a seed-like inspiration to the form; a combination of the natural and refined that I aspire to in my own work.

You can see it below displayed on the Kachemak Bay table which itself combines oiled and untreated wood  – the natural and the refined – and which I always envisaged as a place for special objects.

When I was making the Dartmoor Stream cabinet I also imagined a ceramic pot behind that gentle opening in the doors – a hint and an invitation to explore what was inside.

I hope one day to have a joint commission with a potter so that we could relate the forms of the clay and wood in a truly integrated way… so that the piece goes beyond a pot on a stand or a cabinet with pots in it.

But there’s something else about the aesthetics of hand made ceramics that I feel I can learn from.  No-one wants a handmade pot that looks like a machine-made piece.  We want the evidence of the hand in the making.  And there is always an element of surprise and uncontrolledness in the glazes.  Like watercolours, you have to let them do their own thing.  I believe that the Japanese ideal of true beauty in ceramics includes the unforeseen… the happy accident.

I’m not sure whether I’ve yet found the equivalent in my own work.  Yesterday, as I test-fitted the dovetails on a Yew jewellery box, tiny cracks started appearing in the wood.  I failed to see this as a happy accident….just a waste of all the consideration that went into the choice, arrangement, and preparation of those pieces of wood, and the potential abandonment of what looked like being a very lovely box.

But I know that I hope to find a way beyond the commonplace, over-controlled woodworking – the machine aesthetic of the absolutely flat.  I’m not after rustic or coarsely made.  I want refinement with naturalness, control with freedom, yin with yang…..  Maybe it’s something yet to achieve, or maybe it’s something already in my work that I have  yet to see properly.  I am a human being, not a machine, after all.

Thank you for the inspiration, Paul.

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