Changing Forms

A vein of silvery water creeps purposely through the dusty sand, it checks, hesitates then retreats leaving a dark stain on the dry land.  The Norfolk coast at the tipping point of the tide; a twice-daily encroachment and retreat that mark celestial motion.  It is a scape where land, sea and sky are in flux.  A land of mud flats and salt marshes, shifting sand dunes, shingle, earthy sediment and sea mists, where, when the tide is out, it can take more than a couple of hours hard walking to reach the surf from the shoreline. It is an ambiguous space where land is eroded and deposited, sifted and shaped by wind and water and some irresistible will.

I have spent much of my life as a maker either constructing things, building objects, buildings, ideologies… or deducting, carving away what is irrelevant, revealing the form hidden inside the material mass, reducing an idea to its essence.  Lately however I have become fascinated by displacement where you end up with the same amount of stuff as you started with but in a different form.  As I get older, I am more aware that the clump of molecules that constitute me, at some unknown but foreseeable future, will dissipate.  I will cease to exist as an entity but the atoms from which I am made, continue.  They go on to clump with others to form new identities.  In fact, this has been happening to a less dramatic level throughout my life, bits drop off, wounds heal.  This exchange happens at an intellectual and spiritual level as well, we learn from each other , we give and receive love. This changes my sense of self, my relationship to what I do and how I interact with the rest of the world.

Some years ago, after a lifetime working with clay, I turned to other less time critical media.  Chronic pain encouraged me to work with wood where material and process tolerated my much-needed periods of rest and recovery.  I had been inspired by some, chariot wheels I had encountered in a museum in Japan’s ancient capital Nara. They had been excavated from a bog which had preserved and blackened some of the wood while rotting the rest.  I worked with discarded oak fence posts that like the chariot wheels hovered between the manmade form, imposed in the sawmill, and the timber’s intrinsic character revealed by natures unremitting degradation.  Unlike conventional carpentry I first had to discover where the strength in the material still existed, remove what had lost value to find the form.  My imagination was fed by sourcing my material.  An edge-landscape of forgotten spaces and overgrown hedges: unstable, ominous but exciting.  On one occasion a derelict garage on the once Great North Road, England’s ancient route to Scotland, now bypassed by a motorway.  Behind the half collapsed corrugated iron building a WW2 petrol tanker with a mature ash tree growing through its engine.  But even half rotted wood is ingrained with an existing perceptible structure.  I missed giving form to lumpen clay that gives no clue as to what it might become.

“Suffering is justified when it becomes the raw material of beauty”; Jean-Paul Sartre

I was shocked at the physical and emotional impact of returning to clay.  Constant pain is exhausting but it was a blow to my self-image to discover that after four hours work, I was shattered.  What was more interesting however were the emotional and intellectual challenges.  Prior to retiring from university, I had been leading research for my school.  It was a privilege and enriching to support other staff, lecturers in music, media and dance as well as the visual arts in their individual research journeys.  Doing my own research, publishing through exhibition was simply part of the job.  But as Owen Rye has written (“Getting There” CAP 121) there is a tendency in some to become detached with age.  Contacts retire, some die, financial pressure ease and needs are modest.  The questions “why am I making this, who is it for, who gives a damn?” might have always been present but come forward as others retreat.

When I retired from the university I decided to buy and convert a pigsty into a pottery (to wallow in mud).  I already had a workshop, but it was a hundred miles from home and only used as a store.  I had been working on the kitchen table and firing my pieces at college.  Converting the pigsty proved more difficult than expected as the concrete floor had been destroyed by tree roots requiring me to remove by hand tons of rubble, compacted clay and root.  In the process I wrecked an already weak back and knee.  The opportunity to return to clay without further heavy building work arose when Wysing Arts near Cambridge invited experienced makers to use its ceramic workshop.  Wysing’s core activity is providing international residencies to emerging artists.  I had assisted in one of these over a decade ago with an anagama firing.  Part of the attraction was that I might be able to woodfire again as well as joining a vibrant artistic community.  Some of the drawbacks were that the other kilns were electric and could only be fired by the technician.  It quickly became clear to me that I did not have the energy to take on the anagama which had not been fired since my previous involvement.

It was a pleasure to recognized that, despite the break, my body knew how to handle clay: visceral things like kneading and handling wet pots that take time to learn but become instinctive.  But I discovered how much my hands, clawed up from dupuytren’s contracture with the loss of feeling in one finger, lacked their former dexterity.  I realized that some of my knowledge was redundant.  I had worked with reduction for most of my career, using an electric kiln presented some challenges. To have ones work packed and fired by others was frustrating as was the limited access to the workshop and the forty minute journey from home.  But what was the point of doing what I had done before?  I was back because I had unfinished business.

As a dyslexic I had struggled as a child, not just academically but to communicate what I felt and thought in words.  I learnt and thought through making.  Anthropologist Tim Ingold has written about this extensively bringing a kind of legitimacy to those of us who were once mocked for being this way. The emotional exhaustion and exhilaration I had felt on returning to clay was because no other medium allowed me to think in quite the same way.  Displacing clay by hand is, I believe, a unique experience, where, as Ingold points out, the brain is not some command-and-control centre but is as one with the rest of the body.  When I walk backwards round the clay pulling it into shape, like pulling a handle, I am exploring my relationship with the world, expressing a belief that matter matters.  That physical substance can embody the mind and spirit, and the only way to discover this is to do it.  The act of walking backwards is physically enacting a return to something fundamental.  The forms I am currently making may seem like ones I produced before but that is not the point.  They are creative as distinct from innovative (although when I first developed the method, I think innovative). Each one is new and part of exploring the inner self as well as the rest of the universe.  “The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material”.*

The dull mind rises to truth

….“The dull mind rises to truth through that which is material”.*

I had used this technique on the rims of coiled pots as do the Gwari potters of Nigeria, but I adopted it fully when I worked in Ryoji Koi’s studio, Japan.  I admired the fluid, asymmetric thrown tea bowls of early Oribe and Shino and Koi’s crazy pots often well lubricated with whiskey.  “Pulling” gave a similar feel while avoiding me being yet another Occidental throwing Oriental style yunomi.  It also allowed me to work with the wonderful unprocessed mountain clay I was introduced to; “wild” clay as some call dug unprocessed clay, black, but firing white, full of charred wood and lumps of quarts which, if thrown would rip your hands to pieces.  Japan was a profound experience and made me question deeply why, what and how I made.  Many little things still remain with me because they were different: The realization that delicate bamboo chopsticks allow for a much greater range of surfaces than knives and forks.  It made me think more deeply about function.  The fact that Japanese handsaws cut on the pulling stroke made me question how I make and, I was intrigued to discover, they have no word for “remember”.  They say “do not forget” an entreaty to hold on to something you already have. Be yourself.

The form I am working with has, perhaps, the most basic and universal utilitarian function: to hold. An extension of the hand to gather.  Holding with all its associated properties, to protect, nurture, retain, accumulate… but these dishes also have the symbolic function of elevating so that what they hold is also offered.  The handles, holes in the wall of the dish made when wet, invite the user to use both hands in a gesture of giving so that as consumers we physically interact with the meaning of the piece.  The dishes upper surface, originally the base, has a soft curve formed as the wet clay relaxes when the pot is inverted and cut from the bat giving the dish an anthropomorphic quality of resting when placed on a table.

Constructive and deductive thinking have been highly successful strategies.  Complex societies could not have evolved without them, and human’s greatest achievements depend on such thinking.   But many of the recourses we have used so ignorantly in the past we are being forced to recognize as finite.  Constructive and deductive thinking produces waste and waste does not just disappear even if we would like to think so.  Displacement thinking is relevant to many of today’s issues, human and natural. When we attempt to outsource our problems to distant countries they come back and bite us, we must face up that the whole planet is changing because of our own, each and individual as well as collective actions.

Norfolk’s coastline bares the marks of man’s dialogue with nature.  The broken stumps of gnarled timbers trace some vain attempt to hold back the sea.  I dwell on my use of glaze as I watch the sluice-gates at work that mediate the twice daily migration of water, heavy with inland silt.  I gaze at a ship named Kharon leaving for another country as I walk on the beach again.  The pain in my back has not gone away but I have moved it to a different space and am more at ease with the world for so doing.

July 2024

*Abbot Suger, part of a 12^th-century inscription on the doors of St Denis, Paris.