2014 Vase Post

This year I've made a lot of vases, large and small, beginning with the form used to do so many of my lidded boxes. They're similar in proportion, turned on end given a neck and a lip. Sometimes they're rectilinear, sometimes curve sided.

The fun is endless variety coaxed from what seems like only a few variables, pattern, execution, choice of clay, glaze, application, and firing.

A few variables, but the possibilities become infinite. The orange-peel effect if reduced a little more, might have had glaze crawling off the pot and onto the shelf. A bit heavier reduction and the result could have been all black, a slight change to the glaze and the effect could have been glossy.

So with all these inputs what makes one's work personal? I mean where does the unity of one's work come from?

The discovery that Shino can turn black without having a pot that falls apart in the hands was like a light going off somewhere in my dim mental universe. From orange to black and back! What a journey. It felt galactic somehow both towards, and away from starlight.

I'll post more to this file as I get pots photographed. My 2014 Vase post. One for the year so I don't bore my readers silly.

First Three Pots

Here stand three pots. The first three I ever made.

They are heavy, of an iron-rich and heavily grogged sculpture body. They are thick enough and strong enough to drive a nail.

I didn't have a kiln at that time. My wife Ami and I were living on Mott Street, in New York City. I bought a box of clay, then hand-built these on the kitchen table, constructed around some party balloons which allowed the clay to shrink.

I took them back to the pottery store on LaGuardia Place, and let them do the firing. Amazingly, they offered a service doing gas reduction. I liked the way this iron rich clay turned dark. At that time I wasn't even really sure what reduction was.

I waited months for the results.

I think at that moment something in me changed. I found the Bernard Leach book at the New York Public Library. All I could think about was moving out of New York, getting a kiln, and starting to fire.