RELECTIONS ON CLAY AND THE CRAFT FROM ARTISANS WEEK 2023
Working with clay has been for me a making and a shaping, a breaking and a recreating of my mindbody being across the span of a lifetime. I dare to imagine that if I have been made into a vessel of usefulness, it is only through this lived relationship with the material across time. Somehow drawn, as a child, as a young person to it’s dark, dense matter, it’s grounding solidity and forgiving receptivity, adaptability. I unconsciously gravitated towards it’s density, myself so ephemeral, tentative unformed, I somehow became more solid and real with the animacy of this malleable matter in my hands. I somehow was allowed an agency to impact and imprint the receptive substance, to mark make and autonomously shape and wilfully engage with creation in a way that my timidity inhibited in my other experiences of engagement with life, with others, with the world.
Somehow it felt safe, in a way I otherwise didn’t, to matter in this powerful way to the clay, to be in dynamic relationship with a force of reciprocity. It was safe that my agency and will, my gesture and attention could matter to the clay in a way I couldn’t allow in my human relationships. I could let the matter be changed by me, and then somehow sense myself as someone, as something that mattered. With the clay I was afforded the opportunity to practice over and over again what it meant to be a human being.
Making with clay can be a heart altering evolution as the plasticity, elasticity, maliability, receptivity of the material, alchemises into something much less forgiving. As the moisture departs from the material we are left with an exquisite brittleness, so easily ruptured, cracked, shattered. Again and again we face the loss of our notions of control over outcome, of our attachment to perfection, again and again we must meet this capacity to hand over to chance and the sometimes necessity of letting go.
We experience the tender gift of loss and the transmutations of grief so repetitively if we continue to work with clay for any amount of time, with so many opportunities to surrender what we thought mattered, to forgo our attachment to perfection, to the reflection of wholeness, that we must learn a deep abiding attention, our hands becoming sacred vessels for both the capacity for life-tending and also death-wielding. We begin to titrate, to practice meeting, with each blessed mistake, each careless gesture that lands with loss of cohesion, the full spectrum of our own effectiveness, the weight of our own ability to impact creation, to tend and to harm, to birth and to cull, to bloom and to prune our experience. We practice death and loss again and again, building the elasticity, the plasticity, the malleability of the hearts capacity to feel.
From dense, dark, wet, heavy matter, through fragile, dry, brittle precariousness we must now meet the fire, an alchemical agent of otherness that we must hand over our precious creations to. Again we risk loss, but also the perilous joy of surrendering our carefully tended creations over to a force far greater than our own intentions. Again we must meet the tragic surprise, as well as the happy one, as what we have moulded with the willingness of our hands is made other, by the harnessing of powerful forces.
It took a long time for me to find the capacity to meet the fire in this way, to let my relationship to the soft body of me be changed by that much power, to become brave enough to risk disintegration and loss, and in so doing come to know myself as an agent of, a servant to, greater forces of change and transmutation, forces that hold the capacity again to destroy, but also the agency to transform the dissolvable material into something strong and durable, something of purpose and usefulness. The unstable porosity gains a structural integrity and a useful impermeability when it meets with the fire, a gift for containing and protecting precious content, blessed bounty, the creation of receptive space with the capacity to hold. The vessel becomes a carrier of usefulness to community when it has met with the life altering ferocities of fire and survived whole and intact.
As makers we become changed by this embodied knowing, that it is only in meeting and engaging with these alchemising forces, which hold ultimate power over life, that we are forged into something useful and worthy of purpose. It solidifies a formidable trust and a holy surrender. It fosters a glimpse, an insight into how the forces that are greater than ourselves shape us across time, that we are made other by the furnaces of life and our engagement with the archetypal powers. That it is only in the risking of love and loss, that we become a vessel useful to the world.
Clay has taught me to risk mattering, to learn what it means to care, to lose, to transmute loss into a deeper purpose. It has taught me. It has humbled me to know I am at the mercy of formidably agential and alchemical forces, and that I must risk dancing with them, at the risk of being burnt in order to become more than I had ever imagined I could be, transmuted by otherness, enriched and incarnated by reciprocal relationship with earth, with air, water and fire. Clay has taught me to risk mattering, to learn what it means to care, to lose, to transmute loss into a deeper purpose. It has taught me. It has humbled me to know I am at the mercy of formidably agential and alchemical forces, and that I must risk dancing with them, at the risk of being burnt in order to become more than I had ever imagined I could be, transmuted by otherness, enriched and incarnated by reciprocal relationship with earth, with air, water and fire.
