"Far
and away the best gift that life has to offer is to work hard at work worth
doing." – attributed to Theodore Roosevelt
In 1991 when I first stepped into
a clay studio at Kenyon College's craft center, I was a bit scared and
unnerved. I was 21 and had never thought about "making" things
or working artistically. My two great loves were my history studies - I
was always in the library - and swimming. For history I loved writing
papers, I know that sounds weird, but I did. What made the papers fun was
that each time I sat down to compose the latest set of conclusions; I was
synthesizing all of the previous week's research into what I believed to be as
comprehensive an historical model as I could produce. My studies were
about Medieval Iceland and relied heavily on the sagas, which are rich in
historical, cultural, and legal details. Not ever having been to Iceland
and the impossibility of time travel, my job as an historian was to sift
through these primary resources and to establish links and connections, which,
I hoped, would lead to some kind of understanding. My papers attempted to
reveal that understanding with each proposed model about how the medieval
Icelandic legal system worked. Without fail, in the week following each
new paper, I would begin a new book that would show me the foolishness of my
model and would demonstrate just how little I knew. It was frustrating and to an extent, futile, but it was
exactly this cat and mouse chase that made me love research.
With swimming, what I found great
satisfaction in pushing myself and my body beyond what I thought I could do,
only to reach the end of the practice...alive, energized, and reflecting
immediately on that practice saying, "that was bad, but not so bad."
Each practice taught me about my limitations and boundaries, where they
existed both in self-perception and those that were much more real. As a
competitor, the opportunity to surpass previous achievements was an incredible
motivator. Reaching each peak of accomplishment, I knew it would not last
and that only through continued dedicated engagement could I sustain it or
surpass it one day...maybe. That was always the task, trying to move
further but not quite knowing how. I knew that it was possible in some way
and I needed to find out how. As a coach of 90 kids, I had the same
feeling. Watching my team members reach personal goals and beating one of
the best teams in our league (the only time in my 11 years with our team that
we were victorious)...these were thrills. The accomplishments pulled the
team together, yielded the most wonderful maturity, self-awareness that 10 year
olds could offer, and set the groundwork for several of those kids to compete
at nationals in their later high school years.
Well after college, once both swimming
and my historical studies had been traded out for time in the studio, friends
and family would often wonder if I made connections among swimming, medieval
Iceland, and pottery. (Wouldn’t that be something!) Their sense of
connection was literal, printing Icelandic imagery onto the pots or maybe
drawing swimmers onto mugs. For me there were subtle connections, all of
which go directly to the heart of this question that Clare has been asking us
these two weeks, "Why Make?"
In making pottery, there is a rhythm, one on the wheel and
one in the studio, not too unlike the rhythm that our LSU community established
this week working with Clare.
Swimming has this too.
Where many people say they would get bored going back and forth in the
pool lanes for hours each day, I found the rhythm to be extraordinary. In both the pool and the studio, the
union of physical and mental energies within, more or less, repetitive actions
was able to extract thoughts and consciousness that I don’t believe I’ve ever
experienced outside of similar activities – running and long hikes for
instance. The actions and the
intensity of them brought my mind to places where I could feel aspirations,
where I could recognize and see myself and the potential that was mine as a
human, and then to feel the conviction to these thoughts evident in my body,
exhausted and tried by the labor of both the athletic practice and the studio
discipline.
It took at least 4-6 years in my studio before I started to
understand the links between my historical research and the studio
pottery. There are few apparent
topical similarities but there are a great deal of shared procedures in method,
and I quite enjoy the development of successful methods. At base, the similarity is really quite
simple. In each, historical
research and studio pottery, I begin with raw materials, primary sources for
history and dry ceramics materials for the pottery. From those, it is my task as either historian or potter to
organize, compose, and to suggest a model that represents my understanding of
historical concerns or those relating to finding form within utilitarian
purpose. The models, a historical
paper or a cup, bowl, or plate, address my rationale, knowledge, and objectives
at a specific point of time. With
analysis, revision, and further research, I inform the project which leads to
the next model, which hopefully is an improvement. It’s that cat and mouse all over again. Add to that the sensation that marks a
new achievement, the composition of a better pot than the previous one or of
any that I had made before and then the motivation is similar to the athletic
personal accomplishments. From
that point, I work with focus and continue to make in order to find my own
personal best again.
I have known about many of the reflections shared here for
nearly half of my career, but I’m still realizing just how internally they were
known at the very beginning, at the point of recognizing pottery as an
interest. What’s most exciting in
this context is that that very point of recognition speaks directly to Clare’s
question, “Why make?”
In college, after burning out from swimming – a person can
work too much at something – I no longer had an outlet for physical
exertion. My body and mind both
felt the absence of swimming practice and I knew that somehow I needed a
substitute but just did not know what it might be. At the same time a friend and I would walk through the rural
hills of Ohio talking romantically about working on a self-sufficient
farm. We liked what seemed to us
to be the purity of a life spent producing what we needed and we found that the
philosophies underlying this were quite exciting. I was 21 and that is one of the best times in life to dream
and project philosophies into action.
During my days at college I felt lacking in skills, wishing to chop wood
for a fireplace or to grow a garden, but living in the dorms, I needed
neither. Although I loved reading
the history, the satisfaction that I gained from the books each day seemed
incomplete. What was missing was a
connection between my studies and other people. To find balance I tutored a 2nd grade reading
class. I liked sharing my time
with the kids and I loved the reciprocity in the relations. Teaching them to read helped me to
learn about learning, to gain awareness of the specifics for each of these
8-year old lives, and to work alongside kids whose undiagnosed but apparent
learning disabilities were visibly separating them from classmates who would
move forward, graduating to 3rd grade without them. Their needs to learn, to feel good in
achievement, and to face the struggles of connecting sounds to written symbols
prodded me to develop a reading game.
One boy, in his second year in 2nd grade finally learned his
vowels with this game. Somewhere
in this 2nd grade classroom experience, there was something present
that my historical studies could never address and whatever it was, it made me
anxious to gain a skill, as I called it.
So it was with these three things prominently on my mind - a
physical outlet, self-sufficiency, and a skill that I could share with others –
that I joined a friend in a casual afternoon trip to Cleveland to see her
sister. The home was huge. My friend’s brother-in-law, Jim, was an
oil executive. As we toured the house,
some objects kept coming into my view.
In the kitchen I saw a distinctive set of pottery canisters. In the living room, large open bowls
sat on side tables and around the house there were similar pieces. The pottery
resembled itself but didn’t match anything else in the home. I turned to my friend Katie, curious
about the oddity of the pots in this environment. “Where did these dishes come from?” Katie said that Jim had made them. I then asked a pivotal question, but I
had no idea that it would be. “If
Jim is an oil executive, why would he make them if he could just buy
them?” No joke, instantly in that
moment, those three life needs that I described above instantly
intersected. The intensity of that
moment was so much that I knew it to be impossible to ignore. I don’t even know how my friend
replied. My mind was racing,
filling in the response to my own question, but instead of clear answers, what
I found was self-recognition and more or less a dare to pursue the revelation
to see what was there. I had never
had one of these Road to Damascus type moments before in my life and knew that
something truly monumental had happened.
To ignore it would be a grave error; I didn’t’ know why; I just knew
that it would be.
So at 21, without any prior interest or experience making
art, I stepped into the craft center and threw my first pot. Love at first touch. I think many clay artists felt the same
way in their first contacts with the material. The rest, between 1991 and now has been an interesting,
surprising, and curious search to figure out what is or was underlying that
intersection of ideas in that home in Cleveland. The question, “Why would you make something if you can
buy it?” is a strong component of Clare’s project and it has brought me full
circle back to where I began.
Funny thing is that I never feel like I move too far away from that initial
question from 1991. Each semester,
I start class by asking each student, “Why are you here in an art class?”
In a Macro sort of way, each time I step into my studio, I’m
asking this question – or those relating to it – and the work that I produce,
even the fact that I would still produce any work at all, suggests that I’m
still trying to establish a model for understanding, one that seems complete,
knowing that of all things, good questions only open up to more. For me, the making confirms that there
is something to extract from my life, from my time, and from developing forms
that represent how I would like to address my world. The making, in a bit of a twisted way, also lets me know
that I will never really get it; that I will never really comprehend the
complexities behind the making and the motivations for it. And I like that quite a lot.
Andy Shaw
4.5.12
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