Here is the essay in its entirety:
YOUR DEEPEST MIND
by
Alex Matisse
Some days the work is maddening; others, it is a delight, the clay springing from the wheel head effortlessly, as though it could not wait to be turned to its final form. Other days the clay stays obstinately close to the wheel, falling back down when it is worked too hard, tired and wet, retiring to a growing pile of slumped pots in the corner of the splash pan.
It was the spring of 2006 when my blue Vanagon wheezed up the last pitch of Early's Mountain, North Carolina. At the crest a sign read, "Welcome to the Big Sandy Mush Community." I rode the brakes the rest of the way down. As I passed the old Fords and Dodges with their diesel engines grinding up out of the bottom land, their drivers still waved at the passing cars; not so much a wave, perhaps, as one crooked pointer finger, raised from the top of the steering wheel, above a cracked dashboard. After winding through fields of silage and tobacco, I arrived at the Jones Pottery where for two years I was to work under the watchful eye of Matt Jones, learning his craft.
Matt's introduction to clay was similar to my own. Just a decade prior, at a small college in Indiana, Matt somehow ended up in a pottery class. From Earlham College, he went to apprentice with a Connecticut potter, Todd Piker, who introduced him to the family of potters we are now all part of. After two-and-a-half years with Todd, Matt and his wife, Christine, moved down to North Carolina to work for Mark Hewitt, another potter who, like Todd, fires a large wood-burning kiln. Mark and Todd had worked with the same potter in England, Michael Cardew, who made pots in the English country tradition, not unlike the folk potters of North Carolina. Matt worked for Mark for six months before leaving to find the land he now lives on with his wife and their two children, Linden and Sara Frances.
The pottery, or workshop, is simple. A dirt floor keeps it both cool and dust free, two small windows sit on either side of the door, and below them two potters wheels, the plastic splash pans replaced with wood. Behind the workshop lies an enormous pile of bluish-gray clay, dug with a backhoe from a tobacco field on the other side of Early's Mountain. Matt thinks it should last him 30 years and it probably will. At the far end of the workshop, under a peak-roofed tin shed lies the kiln, like a giant egg cut in half, dug into the hillside.
Potting is a work of extremes. For a few crazy months we work like mad, filling the ware racks with pots, preparing the kiln to accept them, and performing the countless other chores required to keep the pottery in order. The firing approaches with a week of backbreaking, painstaking work. The loading takes time and mental strain as each pot is placed into the kiln, each one raised off the kiln shelves or floor with a chalky white mixture of alumina hydrate, china clay, and sawdust, called wadding. After four or five days, the kiln is full and the door is carefully bricked up, the cracks filled with clay and sand.
Overnight a small fire dances at the feet of the pots on the very front ranks to make sure all residual moisture is evaporated. Then the fire starts in earnest, growing gradually over the hours until the temperature reaches 2,300° Fahrenheit, the interior of the kiln glowing a bright orange-yellow.
The firing is broken down into shifts; as apprentice, it was my duty to watch over the kiln from midnight until six the next morning. On my last predawn firing shift at the Jones pottery I wrote:
This is the time I call the “Grind.” My friends have gone home to their beds to drift off into sleep and I am left alone with the kiln, the dogs, and my thoughts. The next two-and-a-half hours will draw by slowly. The moon sinks lower in the gathering clouds, and the flame slowly works its way farther and father back into the kiln. These are some of my favorite times. I've fired this kiln 10 or 12 times, I’ve lost track by now, but each time I've kept watch over it in the small hours of the night. It’s an easy kiln to fire, rarely if ever stalling, it sometimes seems like a giant, walking up a steep hill slowly, but showing no sign of tiring. As if it would fire the pots into puddles on the kiln floor.
I toss two more pieces of slab into the fire and the kiln roars back to life: 2,050° reads on the pyrometer. This is also the last time I will sit here at this hour. Coyotes are suddenly calling out in the pasture across the road. The dogs wake for a minute from their slumber to let out furtive growls and drift back off to sleep.
This is the part of being a potter few will get to understand or appreciate. It is the hidden part, the quiet part. There is no glamour to be found sitting in front of a fire at 3:45 in the morning. There is no one to watch, no one to applaud. Even the spring peepers are quiet tonight. A bullfrog sounds in the darkness.
When the front of the kiln is to temperature, the flame is then moved back through the kiln by carefully sliding strips of wood into small openings on either side. The fire licks the plates and bowls stacked in the very back, 25 feet from where it started, and winds its way through the flue, past the dampers, and up the chimney out into the night air. When the whole kiln is up to temperature, Matt pours feed salt onto thin strips of wood, which are then carefully placed into the kiln, a few in the front and the rest through the side-stoking ports. The salt instantaneously vaporizes, and then adheres to the surface of the pots adding a bit more shine and luster to the finished wares. After salting, the kiln is given a final few stokes to “soak” a bit longer, and then it is shut down, any visible cracks in the door are filled and the kiln is left to cool. When the kiln has cooled, the door finally taken down, and the pots litter the lawn, glinting in the sun, a pall settles over. So much work and energy has reached its climax, and we are once again left with the staggering prospect of starting over.
The reality of a potter’s life is quite different from the often romanticized notion held by people looking in from outside. It is a tremendous amount of work. To make pots in the "old way" means there is wood to cut, clay to mix, and glass to crush for the glazes. A lot of this work falls on the apprentice, while the master potter has time to create his own work. It is both a matter of economics and an earned right.
It was Matt who told me first that there are no new forms, only old ones turned well or turned poorly. As potters, we are not always asked to invent something new, but instead to carry on a thoughtful conversation with what came before. Out of that conversation, new ideas emerge. Matt’s pots are made from the same clay that the mountain potters of the region used in their dirt-floored workshops a century before, and it is this adherence to material integrity, coupled with his strong classic forms, that give his work depth, presence, and the same quiet dignity as their predecessors.
With the availability of industrially processed clays, the relationship of a potter to his or her medium has changed. Most potters choose to use materials that have been refined, processed, and tested to assure quality and consistency, but in doing so, they lose something less tangible. The Sufi mystic Ibn al 'Arabi (July 28, 1165 - November 10, 1240) wrote:
While watching an artisan mixing clay and making things out of it, one is led to observe superficially that in the hands of a potter clay is passive and inert. One forgets, however, the important fact that clay actively [positively] influences the work of the artisan. Certainly, he can make a great deal of things with clay, but whatever he does he cannot go beyond the subtle and rigid limits imposed by the very nature of the clay. In other words, the nature of the clay itself determines the possible forms in which it can be realized.
The unrefined clay, referred to as blue-pipe clay by the locals, after the Civil War soldiers who sat around their campfires fashioning pipes from it, stretches out in a large pile behind the pottery, almost indistinguishable from the surrounding hillside due to the grass that has sprouted over it. It could be any pile of dirt, save for the end closest to the pottery, where the hard outer crust is scraped away with a spade head shovel every two or three months to reveal the dark blue-gray clay beneath. Compared to the mule-driven pug mills of the turn of the century, Matt’s clay-mixing system is rather twenty-first century. The clay is shoveled into 5-gallon buckets and then poured into a “blunger” to mix with a few other materials. The blunger, designed and built by an Amish man in Ohio, is a simple 55-gallon drum with a motor on top that powers the submerged mixing blades. The drum is filled with water and clay and left to mix, usually while Matt and I break for lunch. When the clay is thoroughly mixed, a sump pump is submerged into the blunger and the clay is pumped into the drying beds, where it will sit for a few weeks, slowly expelling its moisture until it can be brought into the pottery.
I can remember lying in bed at night, in the small apprentice cabin behind the pottery, listening to the glass crusher. Every ten seconds or so. Crunch. In the summers, when the stream slows to a trickle, the glass crusher slows as well until a thundershower sends the muddy water charging down the creek bed, through the raceway, and spilling into the square bucket of the glass crusher. The bucket is on one end of a four-by-four post; on the other are three spikes that point downward. When the filled bucket reaches the ground, the water sloshes out and the spiked end plunges back down, into a steel-bottomed box of broken beer bottles. After a few days of this pounding, the glass has been transformed to powder, which will later be added to the glaze as silica. For hundreds of years this method has been used to crush materials, from the potteries of Japan and China where they pulverized clay and rock to the small farm potteries of the Carolinas where they crushed glass for their alkaline glaze.
When my two-year apprenticeship was over, at the end of our last firing, Matt gave me a present: a large 4-gallon ovoid preserve jar reminiscent of those made centuries before, across the North and South Carolina Piedmont. It has the dark green alkaline glaze of the Catawba region, located just two hours east, down the winding stretch of interstate 40, in the foothills of the Appalachians. The jar is slip trailed, a technique of applying a watered down clay mixture to the surface of the pot with an applicator such as an old restaurant ketchup bottle. It is a technique that spans many ceramic traditions, but for Matt is rooted in the varied potteries of the eastern United States: from Edgefield, South Carolina, where skillful slaves turned functional ware for their masters; to Winston-Salem, where the Moravians brought their colorful slip-trailed red ware down through the Shenandoah Valley from Pennsylvania; to the New England potteries themselves with their salt-glazed stoneware, where they used a combination of slip trailing and traditional brush work to apply cobalt, which once fired turns bright blue.
On one side of this jar, a large buck stands, craning back his neck, next to a pine tree. It is the same buck that appears throughout New England stoneware. On the back is a poem, like those seen on the large jars that came out of Edgefield, where Dave Drake, or Dave the Slave, a well-known nineteenth-century slave potter, often inscribed rhyming couplets on his pots. This one simply reads:
Do this in love
Do this in Madness
Do this with your Deepest Mind
It's Friday again. The weeks are moving so fast now. I only have about 3 more weeks of making pots left and then I will push myself unceremoniously out of the nest. Its pretty great. This past week I made a few of what Joseph calls my "Turban Jars". They are just a hard shouldered jar with a few little lugs. They do have a wonderful flat surface for decorating. The other new form I made which this week were Rundlets (or runlet defending on who you ask). These are a relatively easy throw but so much different than any other pots we make. An interesting tidbit: a rundlet was an old English unit of measurement. They were a specific sized wine cask that held about 68.1913782 Liters. These rundlets, although they don't hold nary as much wine, were made in much the same way as the the big ill-fated ball jar I made at Matt's a little over a year ago. I started the slip trailing on the size up from these and managed to ruin a few pots before I settled on this design. That is often how it goes with new shapes and patterns. It takes a few tries before something fills the space in a way that is actually pleasing to look at.
