Owning a Form
Innovation is really hard to do in the long history of ceramics but personalization is much more achievable. In this article by Jack Troy he explores the process.
“The more you enter into a long campaign of exploring the inner character of even a simple form, the more completely and excitingly it reveals itself with each new realization of the wheel. This is what my life is: for me this is what it means to be a potter.”
- Michael Cardew Quoted in A Potter’s Companion, by Ron Larson, Park Street Press, Rochester, VT. 1993.
In the summer of 1972 a visitor to my booth at an art fair raved about the recent visit she had paid to several potteries in the Seagrove, North Carolina area and suggested I look into it. “It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen,” she said. “It’s better than anything you’ve ever seen! It’s more real than what goes on in college ceramics studios.” The following month I showed up at the Jugtown Pottery outside Seagrove, North Carolina in a VW van with a tent, sleeping bag and potter’s wheel, having made arrangements to work there for a while, doing what might be needed, and simply experiencing daily life in a traditional pottery.
I remember looking through the vocabulary of forms in the sales cabin, and noticing the confidence with which they had been made; how simple most were; how easily they might have been cast, instead of thrown, but the longer I looked and handled the cups, bowls, pitchers, and other pieces made for daily life, the more they revealed of human, touch-based investment – unlike clay whose life-blood has been sucked into plaster molds.
I asked Vernon Owens what forms they could use, and he suggested I make some wren-houses – a form I’d made with some regularity. (In much of North Carolina, “wren” is a 2-syllable word – “ray-un,” said fast.) I set to work, and by lunch-time had 44 of them, with holes and perches, on ware boards. Vernon looked them over quite carefully. “Well,” he said, “I guess we can use this one, and this one, and… that one over there, and, uh, maybe these two,” and went on about his business. Though I’d been making pots for only 10 years, I’d made dozens of wren-houses and knew birds would have nested in any of the 39 I was about to wedge up, but they weren’t Jugtown wren-houses, and I was working at Jugtown.
After lunch, with a Jugtown wren-house in front of me, I did what many of the ceramics teachers I’m glad I never had would have abhorred – I threw one after another of those Jugtown wren-houses, as if pitching ringers in horsehoes or hitting that little circle on a dartboard, all the while knowing it wasn’t anything I’d ever do again unless I came back. “Throwing to the mark,” you might call it – training eye and hand, which aren’t easy learners, but have great potential, to perform in synch with will.
While there is no way to measure the experience of that day, my training delivered something vitally important – a permanent, intricate refinement to my nervous system – a currency to spend or invest in work having nothing to do with wrens or their houses. It was the equivalent of the many thousands of chord progressions musicians play in practice and that underlie and infuse the best of their performances.
When I taught on a regular basis, about every 5 years or so students with a particular keenness to learn throwing would stand out amongst the others, and I’d inquire if they’d ever thought about choosing a form and making 100 of them. (About every 10 years one would take me up on it.) Often the objects were bottles – enclosed forms requiring no trimming – usually made from roughly 1 or 1 ½ pound balls of clay. The idea was to keep every one with no thought to decorating or firing any – “forms to inform the former.”
There always seems to be a variable point – different for each person – when a rhythm develops in the throwing, perhaps when the most intense conscious thoughts and observations go on a little sabbatical, and body-awareness heightens. It’s as if some aspect of our self yearns to find its own expression apart from obeying conscious orders. When that happens, the pots change. Since no one but an expert with an agenda can possibly throw 100 matching bottles, the potter experiences many nuances of the form – width, height, resolution – all the while gaining confidence that will invest itself as only experience can bestow, in future work.
Looking at 100 bottles in profile always leads to reaching out for certain pieces and inevitably, to discussion: “What does this one say about balance? Asymmetry? Stability?” “Why does this shallow S-curve make the bottle look taller than the one next to it that’s the same height but is more bulbous?” “How can this piece look so heavy, yet feel so light?” “Isn’t it amazing how, without even trying, you’ve made the feet so precisely similar? Does that make you feel comfortable or subconsciously robotic?” “Can you remember which pieces you thought hard about, and which seemed to make themselves?” “Which ones, if any, do you intend to fire, and why?” “What would you have left if you recycled everything you made from this exercise?”
To “own a form” is, in a way, to become “pregnant” with it in some neurological way. We retain the power to manifest it in our work, not the way a queen bee lays cloned eggs, but by investing something of that deep-seated experience in whatever we choose to make.
38 years ago I came to “own the form” of those wren houses. These days I have the feeling that in some sense I am happily “owned” by every form I have studied seriously – cup, bowl, pitcher – and they embody whatever fluency helps articulate my work in clay.
Jack Troy
