Teach us to care
And not to care
Teach us to sit still.
T.S. Eliot
The work
“Teach us to care and not to care.”
Increasingly, T.S. Eliot’s petition bounds my practice – by which I mean everything I do and say, consciously, in the studio and beyond. The broken heart and the cool eye; the heedless rush and the still axis of the turning world. To hold nothing back. And hold nothing.
We like to think we make the work. Just as much, I think, the work makes us. It’s a dance, a conversation that invites total commitment and rewards the grace to live in “I don’t know.”
Come dance with 'I don't know'
Clay and humans: They’re both processes masquerading as things, processes largely mediated by friction. Forget pristine. Meaning accrues with the losses, the wearing-away and burnishing that come with age and use.
Craving comfort, we seek contact, only to scratch each other’s surfaces, knocking loose particles (or chunks) of what we foolishly think of as “you” and “me.” With luck, my loose grit becomes your pearl.
Forms come and sit on my head. Some leave, some don’t. Those are the ones I attend to.
Of late, I don’t make pots, but I do make vessels. “Vessel” can denote either a receptacle or a conveyance, a container for safekeeping or a vehicle for exploration. The forms that ask to be made, once made, reveal themselves as reliquaries for our losses and wings for the grief that carries us beyond them.
