exploring the inner realms…
I walked into a potter's studio in the summer of 1968. My heart and head exploded. I knew I HAD to do this, and I did! Years later I discovered that this energy that KNEW I had to make pots is the same energy that appears when the mind is quiet and one is a hollow vessel through which creation flows.
My pots are heavily influenced by the cultures and aesthetics of early high-fired pottery: China, Korea and Japan. I love simple, classic shapes.
I am changed by creating. Changed by being repeatedly dipped in the stream of unfolding.
My intent is to create ceramic objects that change their caretakers, as the silence of creation slowly and gently enters their mind and body.
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I manage and teach at ClayZen Studios, a community pottery in Ojai, California
I also teach at VITA Art Center in Ventura, California
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My dad was an engineer. My mom was a painter. In my work and life I honor both of these ways of interacting with the world.
My early life was more about the engineers world. I loved science and mathematics. I loved the structure and consistency.
My dad spent time with me explaining how to solve problems. How to take things apart and put them back together. How to solve puzzles. I hung around my mom while she painted, doing my own thing in her presence and watching her create a painting, then work on it, changing it until she was satisfied. She never talked to me about what she was doing/thinking/feeling while she worked.
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I never took an art class in school. I focused on the hard sciences. I never knew I had an interest in art at all until I walked into a pottery studio and saw people throwing pots when I was 18. In an instant, I KNEW I had to make pots. It was as if whatever I had absorbed while watching my mom paint HAD to express itself. My whole life became focused on creating. In that instant my love of science and mathematics shifted from my primary interest to a supporting role in my creative process.
This balance between certainty and vulnerability has been a thread through all of the many styles of pottery I’ve made over the last five decades. I love the open, unstructured flow of creating and I love the engineer’s eye that sees patterns, causes, effects. I love how in my best work they are in harmony, in partnership.
The other consistent line through my work is that it continuously changes me. I’m continuously shown that clay doesn’t care one bit about my worries, upsets, obsessions. It only cares about, only shows, the truth of our actual relationship. Not my desires or fantasies. Just the simple truth of our dialog.
In 50 years of surrendering to clay I’ve evolved from an angry, fearful, blaming, isolated person to a happy, compassionate, generous, connected person. My ongoing inquiry of mediation and clay play have been the context in which this alchemy has taken place.
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