STATEMENT
The proof of any art’s lasting value is a comprehensive emotional necessity. It’s something that a person needed to do and which awakens and satisfies corresponding needs in us.
---Peter Schejeldahl, 2012
Time makes the fiery passions faint, and terrible pain unreal. All time really leaves you with is what you build, rather than what you feel.
---Quinn Norton 2013
Childhood—1950-1968
When I was a small child, I loved to play in the mud. On winter nights, I loved to gaze into the living room fireplace, hypnotized by the flames and embers. There were gigantic furnaces at my father’s shop in Los Angeles, where metal coatings were fused to airplane parts. I would run to those kilns, hoping for a thrilling glimpse inside of mysterious forms shimmering with impossible heat. The ground was strewn with crucibles, crusted with gorgeous melted glass.
As I grew up, I collected rocks and spent hours in the dark Hall of Minerals at the natural history museum. There was nothing more beautiful than the infinite variation on every theme of hard and soft form, the rhythmic irregularity of crystals. I loved the big chunks of semi-precious stone with brilliant paint box colors, and those with colors so subtle and mysterious that they didn’t have names.
In high school, I discovered clay in a freshman ceramics class, taught by a local potter who made planters and birdhouses when he wasn’t saddled with teenagers. The deal was implicit, but clear: if we didn’t bother him, he wouldn’t bother us. There was one small electric potters wheel in the corner. Every day, I put on an apron, sat at the wheel, and tried to get the clay to bloom under my hands the way I saw it bloom and grow when the teacher decided to sit down and demonstrate. One day—and one day only--a lump of clay miraculously quieted down and allowed me to push a hole into it and form a heavy little bowl: symmetry. The teacher glazed and fired it. My little bowl came out intact and homely—the size of a navel orange and the color of snot. That beginner’s bowl sits today on the top of my dresser, beside two perfect porcelain bottles of light, watery celadon made by my mentor, Jean Meyer, and a grinning clay alligator, made by my son.
University—1969-1972
In college, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, I finally begin learning to throw. My teacher, Al Johnson had been a devoted student of Marguerite Wildenhain, a Dutch-born, Bauhaus-trained potter who became one of the major founders of studio ceramics in this country. As Al brought ceramics classes from non-credit status to an essential part of a design program, he passed along Wildenhain’s disciplined choreography of throwing technique, and her unassailable Bauhaus forms to a generation of university students.
Deeply influenced by Marguerite Wildenhain, and by Bernard Leach’s romantic marriage of Japanese and British functional pottery tradition, studio ceramics in seventies Northern California became an orthodoxy of reduction-fired stoneware and porcelain, with Leach’s The Potters Book as the Old Testament, and Daniel Rhodes’ Stoneware and Porcelain: The Art of High Fired Pottery, as the New. Just north of Santa Cruz, Bruce and Marcia McDougal ran the Big Creek Pottery in an old dairy farm on a hilltop between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Cruz mountains. Their pottery and their partnership combined the free-spirited zeitgeist of the early 70’s, with a deep devotion to solid design and disciplined craftsmanship. I spent my 20th summer, one of a dozen students, at a wooden kick wheel, filling ware-boards with practice mugs, bowls, pitchers and jars. We were all on the cusp of adult life, and all earnestly pursuing the dream of life as a studio potter. We would live somewhere beautiful and make our easy livings playing with clay. We got the message and we embraced it: follow your bliss.
Israel and England-1972-1980
Israel was the country of my ethnic roots and the roots of my family. I spent a year of college on a kibbutz, began to learn Hebrew, and was intrigued by the possibility of life in Israel, a seductively chaotic, dynamic meeting-place of ancient and new. Since a studio potter could live anywhere; I decided to live there.
After graduating UC Santa Cruz, in the winter of 1972, I moved to Jerusalem and got a job at the cavernous old Rockefeller museum in East Jerusalem, making pen and ink drawings of ancient potshards for archeological catalogs. I rented studio space in a vaulted old Arab house in the center of town and kept on making my versions of Big Creek/Wildenhain/Northern California functional ware, and tried to temper them with the timeless forms of the ancient pots.
At the museum, I put the bits of ancient ware on a measuring table and learned the tricks of conjuring the form of a whole pot from one remaining shard. The fragments were often rippled with a thrower’s finger marks. As I tried to solve the mystery of a pot’s unbroken form, I became aware of a haunting and humbling connection; some anonymous potters’ shred of immortality had come to me from across the centuries. Fired clay is what remains; how could this connect me with time?
In the spring of 1973, I was offered a production-throwing job in a small pottery in Warwickshire, England. The town of Snitterfield, Warwickshire consisted of little more than a pub, church, post office and this modest pottery. I worked with a small, affable crew of other young potters, throwing unexciting forms to exacting measurements, that made their way from the kiln to the storefront shop. I rented a room in a large, old-fashioned rectory from a large, old-fashioned family. Father was a solicitor who commuted to London, wearing a bowler and carrying an umbrella. He baked bread for the family and sat at the head of the dinner table every night in a large dining room, lined with family portraits on walls the color of olive leaves, with his wife, four daughters, two sons, and me. Today, the Rectory is a bed and breakfast in the English countryside. Perhaps the pots I gave the family are still in the kitchen.
Late in 1973 I returned to Israel and began an apprenticeship with Jean Meyer, one of Israel’s premier ceramic artists. Jean was a younger contemporary of Lucie Rie and Hans Coper. Her own art education took place in the Chelsea School of Art and Camberwell School of Art, influenced by teachers Herbert Read and Henry Moore. She lived on Kibbutz Ein Hashofet, and shared her studio with another ceramic artist, David Morris, American-born sculptor and alumnus of Alfred University. I worked alongside Jean and David, inspired by their dedication to simultaneous production, experimentation and growth, leaning more about clay, glazes and firing, and gradually broadening my point of view beyond the confines of thrown, functional forms.
Encouraged by Jean, I enrolled in the Betzalel Art School in Jerusalem for the 1974-5 school year; Jean’s friend, Ruth Duckworth, and Scottish-American potter, David Cohen, would be guest-teaching in the Ceramics Department. During that pivotal year, Duckworth challenged me to explore organic forms and David turned my attention to the stark desert rock formations of the Negev and Sinai.
In 1976, I opened my own studio and built a gas kiln in Herzlia, Israel. Between 1976 and 1979, I made work in storeware and porcelain that I sold from the studio, in juried crafts fairs and in design stores, like Bathsheva de Rothchild’s store, “Batsheva”, in Tel Aviv. I taught in a government-sponsored rural adult education program. I made a fruit bowl that sat on Golda Meir’s dining room table, and a few of my students turned chicken coops and sheds on their farms into their own studios.
In 1979, I was offered a year-long position with the UN Development Program, running a small pottery in the Netherlands Antilles, West Indies, on the island of Aruba. The timing was right; the lease was up in my Herzlia studio space, and this sounded like an adventure. It was. With a crew of young local Antillean potters, we made ware inspired by the indigenous work from nearby Venezuela, and traveled there to visit family potteries in Andean mountain villages, and urban studios in Caracas.
Northern California—1980-1986
I returned to California in 1980 and settled in Berkeley, where there was a vibrant studio pottery community—a return to my Northern California roots. I rented a studio in West Berkeley, shared with potters, Elizabeth Stanek and Ericka Clark. Making a living by making pots was still about throwing stoneware and porcelain functional ware. Marketing ceramics meant setting up booths in street fairs and juried fairs, and wholesaling work to boutiques and gift shops. There were the big, twice-yearly studio sales. I made tedious work that sold well. I made work that pushed into directions new to me--which didn’t sell well at all. Every so often, the market and the exploration intersected--but not often enough. The 70’s idyll of the professional studio potter began to lose its meaning and its promise. The world did not need more coffee mugs. Clay work began to feel anachronistic, self-indulgent and economically untenable.
A Second Career—1986-Present
In 1986, I decided to leave the marketplace and to leave the professional identity as potter. I would make my living in education, satisfying a growing need to contribute directly to the lives of others, as well as my curiosity about child development and learning. I entered graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley, and emerged seven years later with a doctorate in educational psychology.
But I kept my kiln and kept a studio. I could leave behind the world of crafts fairs, shows and galleries, but I couldn’t leave clay. I worked when I could, and as I could, raising a child and working full time as a school psychologist. I created projects with school children and sold work to benefit schools. I hiked and walked on beaches, moved and fascinated by the rhythmic designs left by drying mud and ebbing tides. I started picking up rocks again. I experimented with wood ash and mud from a trip to the Dead Sea. I became curious about wood firing
In 2005, I moved to St. Helena, in the Napa Valley to work as a psychologist for the St. Helena public schools. I set up my studio in the old barn next to my house and met Richard Carter, an extraordinary clay artist and kiln-builder in nearby Pope Valley. In 2006, I joined the community of potters who team up to fire the Anagama and Naborigama kilns on Richard’s pastoral ranch, the Pope Valley Pottery.
Wood Firing
To fire pots using wood in the 21st century is to go to the heart of anachronism. Richard’s Anagama kiln is shaped like a firebrick Quonset hut, 150 square feet, consisting of four sections, or chambers. Each ten-day firing requires nine cords of wood---mainly oak and fir---hand-split from local fallen trees, as well as several pallets piled with pine scraps from a local factory that makes wine boxes. The kiln takes three days to load, with each piece placed on its own platform of fireclay and rice hulls, or on bedding of crushed oyster shells, to prevent the ash-formed glazes from melting the pots to the shelves. Then the doorway is bricked up and the kiln is brought to temperature, chamber by chamber, over a seven day span.
A digital pyrometer measures the temperature changes, second by second. At least one member of the firing crew watches the pyrometer, and more importantly, monitors the overview of pyrometric cones, the color of the kiln’s glow, the sheen of the pots inside, the quality of smoke from the stack, the ebbing and flowing rumble of combustion. All of this determines the timing, content and quantity of wood, and determines what part of the kiln is stoked. Around the clock, crew members take turns in three or four hour shifts. From the sleepy beginning, through the steady middle, to the roaring end of each firing, the wood kiln becomes like a live creature and the firing, a consuming dance. It takes another full week for the kiln to cool.
The long ordeal of firestorm temperatures, blasting melted ash, and flashing chemical reactions creates subtle and magnificent surfaces. The kiln and the potter replicate geological forces that can echo geological beauty. The play of clay, ash and metal oxides, crystallized, shiny, or matte, crusted with unmelted refractory detritus or slick with frozen dripping silica---results are never entirely predictable.
The aesthetics of wood fired ceramics are not easy. The surfaces I discovered have led to the forms I work with. The infinite variables at work in a good wood firing create complex and subtle surfaces that continue to reveal themselves long after the pieces leave the kiln. My challenge is to find forms that will survive the fire, gain motion from the melting and cooling, and bear the rough surfaces with a logic of their own.
There is mundane and repetitive labor involved in clay work, as in any craft. But within that labor, I try to set the conditions for clay to astonish me, in the making as well as the firing. I work with stoneware containing minerals from the Sierra gold country, as well as porcelain and a light, iron-bearing stoneware. I layer and dry contrasting slips onto clay, stretch the clay for slabs, and make shapes that address my old fascination with the way forms mimic and echo organic and inorganic processes in the natural world. The infinite variables at work in a good wood firing create complex and subtle surfaces that continue to reveal themselves long after the pieces leave the kiln.
If the process of making something contains some wonder for the maker, then there’s a chance that another’s experience of viewing, handling, using the piece, can do the same.
As a woman now past age sixty, I still love to play in mud. I’m still thrilled by the glow of contained fire. The motion of a hand on clay is the effect of one person in one moment, on a small piece of earth. Fired, this is the gesture captured and the gesture that lasts.