Figure and Ground

I found clay at school at fifteen and was immediately beguiled, following the curling finger of enticement without questioning. There was no need to question, it was a simple matter of discovery and intrigue, one which has continued for thirty-five years.

As a ceramics student in the eighties, I was fascinated by a statement from “The Unknown Craftsman” by Soetsu Yanagi :

“When you are doing your work, you and your work are two different things, but when you become the work and do the work, true work becomes possible”.

I spent months, years, throwing boards of pots, hundreds of them, whilst yearning to achieve this condition of becoming, and became frustrated.

We cannot become ego-less in order to make good work. If we did truly achieve a state of selflessness, we would be somewhere else doing something else with our lives, like Mother Teresa. However, I do agree with Grayson Perry when he says "A potter's most important tool is the hammer".

These days a certain proportion of my work is thrown on the wheel, but the act of throwing itself I find the least enjoyable activity, like rolling slabs. When you begin to go to work on the slab is best. I love turning a thrown pot, at which point you can really begin to see the piece come to life. Turning, texturing, painting and glazing I like best.

This idea of somehow jettisoning duality is difficult when making pots. But it is still possible through practice to produce spirited work, which for me is paramount. Even when it feels like exciting things are happening during the working process, when it feels like you are really discovering, creating, making a difference, making something possible, all around can be agonising chaos and head-crunching concerns. Not the Hamada ‘walking down the hill in a pleasant breeze' backdrop for me. True creative release never arrives, otherwise we would have nothing left to do.

During a former period in my life I was a baker. I baked thousands of loaves of bread. On one particular day during my working shift at the bakery I experienced what I can only describe as this condition of one-ness. There was absolutely no question of myself and the bread being two separate things – I was bread and bread was me – and it was scary and exhilarating because I had lost all trace of self-consciousness, a sort of out of the body experience.

The only time I have ever experienced anything similar to this with my work as a potter was during the last firing of my wood kiln in Cumbria, at Easter in 1990. The self and the activity became completely fluxed together so that conscious feeling was lost and everything inside and out took on its own single frequency of vibration, and I don’t just mean here ‘being absorbed by one’s work’, I mean being something other. There could have been loaves of bread in that kiln, it didn’t matter.

When I was thirty years old William Marshall said to me: “You don’t make your best work until after you are fifty”. Encouraging words for a mature student on the second year of a ceramics course. Next week I will be fifty. I’m looking forward to some improvements.

Gary Wood 2005