*Third Avenue Clay. Book- Finding One's Way with Clay. The Art Barge. Mary Oliver Poem.
I made pinch pots for a year. I wanted to work with my hands, free from any constraints of the work 'being or belonging to anything specific'.
So every Saturday in 2002, I went to Adrienne Yurick's Brooklyn Third Avenue Clay studio and pinched pots. Some early pots!
It was there that she introduced me to the book 'Finding One's Way with Clay' by Paulus Berensohn. I loved it. And 15 years later I have found my way back to the book while pulling together some ideas for The Art Barge workshops.
Looking up Paulus Berensohn online to find more info about him and his life, I am sad to learn of his recent passing on June 15th of this year.
Berensohn was born and raised in NYC, a dancer first and then a potter who's 'passionate advocacy for art’s transformative power remained a central theme throughout his life’s work'. You can read about his life and history here on NCECA's blog article Remembering Paulus Berensohn and this blog entry from the Penland School of Crafts where he taught at and resided by for 30+ years. There is also a lovely video To Spring from the Hand.
The book is a beautiful ode to working with ones hands, honoring & celebrating equally the experience and the craft, dancing the dance, walking the walk, pinching the pot.
Some passages from the book...
'start at the beginning'
'in the deepest sense of this is what I believe technique is- the ability to breathe the spirit of our lives into what we make...I don't believe it to be a talent that we either have or don't have. We all breathe, we are all alive, we all have unique qualities. Yet it takes hard conscious and unconscious work for most of us to connect these facts with what we make, to find OUR pots as we also seek our dance and our song'
'The molecules of clay are flat and thin, when they are wet they become sticky with plasticity and hold together as in a chain, a connecting chain. I like picturing that in my head. A life of increasing plasticity in which I make the connection between the life I'm living and the objects I'm forming'
'the aliveness of forming a simple bowl'
'it's very helpful if you can engage in this exercise with as little prejudgement as possible. Don't decide if you like the exercise or don't before you do it. Try to witness what you make without declaring it good or bad, ugly or beautiful. Such declarations seem like very heavy burdens for such young work to bear....these are first steps, and like those of a young child they may be uncoordinated, uncertain, and you may fall down, but they may also be enlivened by discoveries of your own and as sense of joy in a new ability opening up'
'The path I was following was no longer a straight one that assumed a passage from strength to strength, but a maze-like meander full of 'faults' that kept spiraling back to the beginning again and again, almost daily. Instead of growing up I was 'growing down'. Growing down into the heart of the professional where the amateur lives, that lover with an acorn in his hand'
'as soon as I learned how to pinch clay I wanted to share this process...with others. I am less passionate these days about the pots we make as pots than I am in the means whereby of the journey we experience forming them....pinching has invited me to slow down into time, way down into the pleasure and sensuality of first a pinch, then a stroke, then another pinch, and this one here/hear one pinch at a time'
'...now I do this as often as I can: make a pot to return to the earth as an offering, to thank the earth, or as my Aboriginal friends say, 'to sing up with the earth'. I like making this return into a ritual, especially with children. I fill the bowl with compost or potting soil...a few seeds or a seedling and bury the pot in the ground as an act of gratitude, as a tithing as a return'
'May you find at least one seed here, one way or another, that generates in your life as a flower, a clay flower, a flower of this earth through your hands. A singing up'
"To Begin With, the Sweet Grass" by Mary Oliver. Text as published in Evidence: Poems (Beacon Press, 2010).
Will the hungry ox stand in the field and not eat
of the sweet grass?
Will the owl bite off its own wings?
Will the lark forget to lift its body in the air or
forget to sing?
Will the rivers run upstream?
Behold, I say—behold
the reliability and the finery and the teachings
of this gritty earth gift.
2.
Eat bread and understand comfort.
Drink water, and understand delight.
Visit the garden where the scarlet trumpets
are opening their bodies for the hummingbirds
who are drinking the sweetness, who are
thrillingly gluttonous.
For one thing leads to another.
Soon you will notice how stones shine underfoot.
Eventually tides will be the only calendar you believe in.
And someone's face, whom you love, will be as a star
both intimate and ultimate,
and you will be both heart-shaken and respectful.
And you will hear the air itself, like a beloved, whisper:
oh, let me, for a while longer, enter the two
beautiful bodies of your lungs.
3.
The witchery of living
is my whole conversation
with you, my darlings.
All I can tell you is what I know.
Look, and look again.
This world is not just a little thrill for the eyes.
It's more than bones.
It's more than the delicate wrist with its personal pulse.
It's more than the beating of the single heart.
It's praising.
It's giving until the giving feels like receiving.
You have a life—just imagine that!
You have this day, and maybe another, and maybe
still another.
4.
Someday I am going to ask my friend Paulus,
the dancer, the potter,
to make me a begging bowl
which I believe
my soul needs.
And if I come to you,
to the door of your comfortable house
with unwashed clothes and unclean fingernails,
will you put something into it?
I would like to take this chance.
I would like to give you this chance.
5.
We do one thing or another; we stay the same, or we
change.
Congratulations, if
you have changed.
6.
Let me ask you this.
Do you also think that beauty exists for some
fabulous reason?
And, if you have not been enchanted by this adventure—
your life—
what would do for you?
7.
What I loved in the beginning, I think, was mostly myself.
Never mind that I had to, since somebody had to.
That was many years ago.
Since then I have gone out from my confinements,
though with difficulty.
I mean the ones that thought to rule my heart.
I cast them out, I put them on the mush pile.
They will be nourishment somehow (everything is nourishment
somehow or another).
And I have become the child of the clouds, and of hope.
I have become the friend of the enemy, whoever that is.
I have become older and, cherishing what I have learned,
I have become younger.
And what do I risk to tell you this, which is all I know?
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.