Ceramics
It is in our bodies that redemption takes place. It is the physicality of the crafts that pleases me: I learn through my hands and my eyes and my skin what I could never learn through my brain. I develop a sense of life, of the world of earth, air, fire, and water — and wood, to add the fifth element according to Oriental alchemy — which could be developed in no other way. And if it is life I am fostering, I must maintain a kind of dialogue with the clay, listening, serving, interpreting as well as mastering. - M.C.Richards Centering in pottery, poetry and in the person
Working in clay has always had a special place in my life with its connections to childhood through playing in the dirt piles or at the beach making castles. It has always grounded me.
It may have been for the pleasure of teaching pottery as a young teen art camp counselor that persuaded me to follow in my father’s footsteps and attend art school. To this day the process of turning a pot on the wheel is a ceremoniously rich occasion. When teaching, out of all the possible ways of working with clay, when it comes time to throw on the wheel, the students are way excited. There is nothing like looking down over a spinning earth with ones hands there shaping its destiny. Everyone somehow gets this metaphor for ones own life intrinsically.
“The creative spirit creates with whatever materials are present. With food, with children, with building blocks, with speech, with thoughts, with pigment, with an umbrella, or a wineglass, or a torch. We are not craftsmen only during studio hours. Any more than a man is wise only in his library. Or devout only in church. The material is not the sign of the creative feeling for life: of the warmth and sympathy and reverence which foster being; techniques are not the sign; "art" is not the sign. The sign is the light that dwells within the act, whatever its nature or its medium. - M.C.Richards Centering in pottery, poetry and in the person
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