CLAY & COSMOS

My relationship with time did not begin at the potter’s wheel, nor did it mature through the inevitable and unstoppable tick of standard clocks. It was formed, even forged years earlier, fed on a steady diet of vintage science fiction and the sweeping, cosmic geometry of Carl Sagan. Watching Cosmos, I learned to see the universe not as a static backdrop, but as an ancient, unfolding tapestry where entropy and gravity are constants. Sagan helped give me this sense of deep time, a perspective where human history is reduced to a microscopic speck on a cosmic calendar, and where millions of years represent the smallest, most casual fraction of our vast universe. It is an overwhelming realization, one that shifts your gaze from the horizon directly in front of you to the absurd and incomprehensible infinite. Yet, paradoxically, it is this exact sense of cosmic scale that guides my hands when they are slick with slurry, throwing clay on a spinning wheel working in a studio where decades old music lingers or choices made to enhance our environment with “new” pots.   

When you look at the archeological record, there is a seismic shift that occurred in what amounts to a literal blink of a cosmic eye: the transition from actual stone to the fired vessel. Suddenly, we learned to shape the earth and trap fire for ritual, necessity and the promise of tomorrow, we turned raw clay into functional form. In the grand timeline of reality, this monumental leap happened in a flash as it bridges the gap between primitive survival and conscious creation, transforming chaotic geology into deliberate geometry, form and vessel.   

This forces an existential question, what is time to us as curators, and what is time to a pot? We treat these vessels with immense care, even reverence, displaying them caring for them and treating them as precious markers of our own time and contemporary culture yet our stewardship is inherently fleeting. The pot itself exists on an entirely different metaphysical plane. Once formed and fired, the intense heat vitrifies the clay, freezing its trapped silica matrix into a durable, glassy structure rendering a pot immortal in terms of time if not animation. That matrix does not share our mortality, long after the flesh has returned to dust, long after our current empires have dissolved into myth and forgotten with a whisper reminiscent of Shelly’s “Ozymandias”, that silica matrix, the form, the structure will remain. It will survive for millions of years, a nearly indestructible relic waiting silently in the dirt and subject only to geological upheavals.   

Surrounded by the quiet rhythm of the passing seasons, I often find myself drifting, contemplating our place in this web of recycled matter where the truth of the philosopher kings, Crosby, Stills & Nash* anthem echoes deeply: “We are stardust, we are golden, we are billion-year-old carbon.” The very atoms that comprise my hands, the carbon molecules in my bones, all of the necessary minerals waiting in the clay bed were all baked/ forged in the hearts of dying stars eons ago finding their way into something new, some momentary and some destined for some sense of longevity. Simply put, pottery is simply the act of one form of stardust reshaping another.    

Ultimately, we must accept a humbling and yet, inescapable truth: we will have these objects for only a very, very brief moment in time, we will never truly own the pots we collect, nor the one’s we make as potters but there is a hint of immortality in that making. We are merely temporary guardians, passing them through our brief flash of consciousness. We hold them for an afternoon, a decade, perhaps a lifetime, before passing them along to the deep future, a future where the pot will endure, keeping watch over a universe that is in reality just beginning.     

On a lighter note, here is something new(ish) from Bizen potter, Baba Takashi, an Oni-Shino guinomi. Though this fits broadly under the specter of Tsukigata’s Oni-Shino, I think it is safe to safe it falls within the general parameters of how I look at this specific surface. The form is simple enough with a strong wari-kodai and an interplay between feldspar, ash and iron the three requisite components of any Oni-Shino surface. As I mentioned, Baba is probably best known for his Kuro-Bizen with flourishes and highlights of cobalt across the surface adding a unique perspective to modern Bizen and this Oni-Shino work adds another avenue of pursuit for the innovative Okayama Prefecture native. Given the lead in to this guinomi, I wonder where this piece will be in 25, 100 or a thousand years, curious minds and all that. 

(* I realize Joni Mitchell wrote WOODSTOCK but I prefer Crosby, Stills & Nash)