Each month as the moon becomes full and sends it's light towards us, I generally prepare to build a fire to fire vessels, especially in the colder months. Firing this way has been part of the practice since almost the beginning. We are all electrical beings, and everything we interact with is an electrical event, and it would be naive to believe we are unaffected by her light. How exactly though, I won't pretend to know, but I'm always excited to get closer to knowing. Nonetheless, the energy that comes together between my actions, the fire and the moon have been hard to ignore.
I'd like to think that by this point I have figured it all out, but more and more I am realizing that working with wild clay and fire in this way that I will spend the rest of my life in pursuit of learning. One of the hardest things in this practice isn't all the steps and the sanding my fingertips off, but the fact that with all the wild variables at hand, inevitably one or a few pieces will come out having popped or cracked. Sometimes this is expressed in a subtle way, and sometimes more drastically. I never know going into it which pieces this wild nature will be expressed though, so I put in the same love to each piece regardless, often times the piece given the most time is the one to be affected.
In exploring these expressions with a dear friend and incredible artist Marc Baseman he shared these sentiments:
Every culture has a similar proverb (first I heard it was African) that scars are proof of a life fully lived. People. Pots. Same thing. So it goes. Kintsugi, the Japanese practice of honoring the imperfections, and celebrating the beauty of broken things was an idea Kenny Price was very familiar with: while lowering a large flat stone outside of Kenny’s and Happy’s bedroom window it cracked- he laughed with the crew saying it’s a good thing, it’ll let the evil out! Which is one way of acknowledging the flaw. Your pieces reminded me of the inverse notion captured in the refrain of Leonard Cohen’s tune, Anthem: Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in