In making these pot women, I stray into the notion of joining the clay and bringing to life the feelings of people I have met only in abstraction. How can I do that?! It seems too arrogant and presumptuous. And of course it is.
What I do, in fact, is give form to part of me that I feel the need to negotiate with. I need to bring out the abandoned person, fashion its likeness, sustain its collapsing tendency, allow it to retain precariousness and flaw: just make it all bearable before it can be fired and fixed satisfactorily. So, no, this is not a strangely vulnerable, barely human form. This is not an emigrant with a small baby having to roam and desintegrate in a careless and violent society. This is who it is: a shard of me.
A lump of clay is, unlike the bright white page, a thing without dignity, packaged in a red or buff plastic bag. It is not hard to gouge lumps out of it, to knead it, to compress it, to attack it with fury or to coax it softly into shape. The only sentiment it will not brook is disregard and negligence. If left, it will become resentfully brittle or it will slump discouraged. So, staying together, the form evolves with thought and becomes.
Nevertheless, the risks are immense. All that time, all that planning, all that sketching, all those materials for what? One has to be prepared to end up with a piece that has all the ugliness of one's fears, all the split badness of schyzoid dread and no resolution of integrated beauty; it is not for me shameful that the clay refuses to obbey my command, nor that I fail to pursue it until it does. The shame is that I fail to press myself beyond the ordinary level of awareness and discover that scary cavern within and there delve for acceptance of my ugly self and my beautiful self. When Beauty falls in love with the Beast, there is success, there is glory.
The artist "
who needs to control [the work] completely will produce an over-refined, stifled and lifeless work that has been allowed no independent intrinsic vitality and life of its own." Instead, I should learn to "
develop a genuine and sensitive dialogue witht he artwork as an independent object." - so says
S.J. Newton in
Painting, Psychoanalysis and Spirituality. Furthermore, says he, the art work should expose the entire creative process in its dynamic, it should have the mark of the hand that dealt with it, should have traces of incompletion, so that the further dialogue of the piece with the viewer can continue. The artist leaves the door open for others to share in and relate to the work.
No, I genuinely do not worry about my incompetence as a potter. That is, like the common cold, an inevitable nuisance not to be avoided but to be cured in time. I worry about resisting ugliness and dictating what beauty looks like; I worry that I will not be able to remember that it is a symbol I want to produce and not a statement.
I write this because I want to remember. Mostly, in the light of day, out there in the dialogue with each significant other, I forget so easily this quiet flame that burns while I work but flickers when I don't. The question I ask myself is, where lies my road in life? Is it in the clay? Is it in the counselling? Is it with the nurturing family? Am I trying to do too much? Am I living too much inside my own head?
Yes, Bernard, why am I so serious? Because my life is very serious business to me: I remember very well feeling as a child that nobody else seemed to think so! So I've always been this way...
The first single step in this journey of a thousand miles seems to be taken: the CAAF group are meeting with the Feasibility Study consultant. They are showing him the results of a social consultation that happened last month at Chesterfield Market Festival. We have our photo with the Lord Mayor!
We feel that the many hours of dawn meetings at Shirley's house, were well worth the trouble. See here:
