I used to make a lot of things out of clay: bowls, plates, vases, sculptural objects. I still have some of my best work. Some things I knew I would keep the moment the kiln door cracked open. Some of my best work sat on a shelf until the gallery owner returned it to me for lack of interest, like this tall, heavy vase that has displayed gladioli, forsythia and pussy willows over the years.
I still have some unglazed or otherwise unfinished objects in the garage. I look at them whenever I go in there to find some irrigation part or piece of camping gear and wonder what on earth to do with these fragile, bisqued beauties. I gave away almost everything in my studio to a woman who came to buy my kiln. She happily took all the chemicals for making glazes, unused clay, bits and pieces of tools. I kept a small collection of hand modeling tools, just in case I felt compelled to create something. When my new neighbor revealed herself to be a novice ceramist, I gave them all to her.
At one point in my ceramist career I made a lot of objects in the shape of nude women. Venuses as vases, sculpture. My reading and thoughts about women and women’s history were incorporated into the clay as I worked. I cracked the kiln one day to find a load of woman-shaped headless vases that I had glazed only on the interior with spiral cracks from the stress. I finished the accidental process by carefully breaking them into chunks and painting each section a different oil color then reassembling them. I coated them with wax medium and buffed it up into a gorgeous skin-like sheen. They took forever to make. They were stressed, broken and reassembled women. I sold them all. Some were simpler, slender talismans. Some are still waiting.
During this time I made some objects based on the Roman coins I had been studying. Instead of Roman emperors these terra cotta coins had the image of a woman in a soft gesture of gathering or cradling. I made a lot of them and on my walks around the neighborhood I threw them into gardens hoping that someone in years to come would find them when digging a hole for a plant or raking the ground. I threw a few into my garden.
For the last couple of weeks, I have been doing a seemingly endless and, at times, retrograde project in the garden. I’ve been trying to improve the drainage around the house by restoring the soil level from my thirty years of amending and mulching that has raised it by an astonishing six inches. It’s the work of a much younger laborer but I love hard physical work: digging trenches, grading, hauling buckets full of rocks. While doing a semi-final grading of a patch of earth, I turned up this woman. It was the third or fourth time I had found her in that area in twenty years. Each time it is such a sweet surprise. I put her back next to an appropriate plant. Until next time!