Last summer (when I was working on this), I spent quite a bit of time reading through Paulus Berensohn’s Finding One’s Way with Clay.  I was in the midst of a studio school class, more about wheel work, at OCAC, but I found that I was better able to concentrate on the demos and discussion if I kept my fingers busy pinching.  As pleased as I am to be reasonably adept at the wheel, it’s pinching that feels most right to me, where I feel like I understand the process I’m undertaking, and where things evolve slowly enough to seem planned and magical at the same time.

So, while I was puzzling out one of the finer sticking points with the quilt project, I did the same thing.  The first little pot, really a tea bowl, is this cracked and bruised little number. My plan was to try to maintain a gorgeous, smooth interior, thin, even walls, and an exterior surface of tears and cracks. An exterior pushed well past the point of stability.  Then, since I’m doing it to everything these days, I stitched the poor creature up after firing.

I imagine this piece murmuring “Je suis fatigué…” to his shelf-mates.