events

This May I graduated from St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, an accomplishment I am proud of as I recall the many late nights of paper-writing. Though it took me nearly four years to discover, sleep is not negotiable for me, and in these few weeks after graduation I am enjoying the new-found leisure of health, both mental and physical, and realizing an opportunity to focus my attention on the things which have slipped through my fingers, like art. Not that intellectual pursuits and art are mutually exclusive, but I have always struggled to find a balance between the two, and so I welcome the chance to discover their relationship, this time with efforts more amenable to artistic pursuits and less focus on academic rigor.

I recently committed to a two year apprenticeship with Betsy Williams of Dixon, New Mexico which will begin this September. I had the great fortune to work with Betsy last summer. After completing my third year at St. John’s I was worn out, stretched thin, and wondering how I might rejuvenate myself to enter my final year at St. John’s with renewed spirit. I applied for and received funding to work a dual pottery apprenticeship under Betsy Williams in Dixon and Mike Walsh in Santa Fe. I had been interested in clay as a medium since high school and while my previous projects indicated talent, I had not had much time to devote to clay. I was excited to compare the methods of two different potters and to improve my own skills which had reached a plateau, so I entered my summer enthusiastic about all the possibilities I saw unfolding before me.

I was immediately drawn to Betsy’s work. She apprenticed in Karatsu, Japan on the island of Kyushu for nearly five years, and for me there was something that made her pottery stand out from the rest. When Betsy showed me her method of throwing, the lines between the style I had been taught (if I may label my small body of work with a particular style) and Betsy’s tradition became more delineated. Betsy does her wheel work using the method of throwing off the hump, a technique both efficient and orderly, because it affords the potter the ease of making pieces continually without having to stop in order to add more clay. The Japanese seem to have fashioned this method for the promotion of repetition and exactness. Draw the clay up to form a bead shape at the top, squeeze to make it the correct width, drop your thumb into the center, and quickly pull out and up to create a vessel. Betsy set me to work with these guidelines and a simple cylindrical cup that I was supposed to replicate; I repeatedly made the cup collapse.

I was learning how to throw all over again. The awkwardness and plethora of collapsed cups I produced were steps along the way toward embracing an age-old tradition. I was awed, humbled, frustrated, and overwhelmed by the tradition that was being opened up to me, but the sense of tradition that I got from the whole process was what held me transfixed. The repetition, the discreet steps, the amount of so-called failures before any victory all seemed extremely ritualistic and attractive for this very reason. I began to wonder about all the implications tied up with this Japanese tradition which was so vastly different from the types of western training I had previously had in ceramics. Was spending so much time trying to prefect a simple cylinder tenable for me, a Westerner?

As I reflect on my state of mind last summer I can identify several reasons why working with Betsy was so appealing. For one my task at the wheel, though technically difficult, was basically simple. I was to replicate a cylinder, copy it down to its very last detail, recreate its height, width, and wall thickness. My project, so well contained, was to focus on one thing and to do it well. I was aiming for a level of perfection never before achieved in previous projects. Certainly at St. John’s I had numerous projects before me simultaneously, which I did my best to accomplish quickly and as well as the allotted time would allow; still, there was rarely the sense of accomplishment that comes with doing something excellently. St. John’s was a lesson in efficiency while Japanese pottery was beginning to feel like a lesson in mastery. The repetition in my wheel work was not merely for the sake of replication, but rather it was building up for something which was yet to come. Every master starts from the basics. The pianist first learns her scales and the painter how to see by sketching her environment. The act of submission in the artist during the beginning stages of learning an art is common across cultures. No doubt that with any time investment there is a risk which we as humans inevitably feel with the ephemeral nature of our lives; but often we find some sort of trust or faith in our ability to improve over time. It is this very trust that I am challenged to entertain while I search for my place as an artist.

Even a year later I still have not perfected that cylinder, and I will continue to work on it for a while yet. I still have difficulty conveying the appeal of my apprenticeship to others. How do you find the words for something that just feels right? In many ways my decision is extremely personal and based largely on the series of events that create my life, but I also believe that there is a more general and accessible reasoning behind my choices. The power in the ritual of initiation is profound and my work with Betsy truly feels ceremonial. The repetition, the process at the wheel with its mechanical steps, and my reliance on faith all point toward an end great in and of itself. Participating in a process that will eventually initiate me into the world of ceramics with a new level of ease and awareness makes the time and effort well worth the wait and the formality far more meaningful.

The apprenticeship will be disciplined and rigorous, not unlike my time at St. John’s, but rather than the language of logic, I will be learning the language of hands, and, with any luck, afforded some knowledge of how one language relates to the other, and how to use them so that they might compliment one another. It will be a time for learning rather than asserting, but in this distinction is not the mere act of submission. Instead is the conscious and active decision to place myself in a new learning environment – not one that asks questions in order to find answers but one that entertains the possibility of answers not being readily available.