Keep

Oct 14

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let’s not speak in any language;
let’s stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

—Keeping Quiet, Pablo Neruda

The ‘sudden strangeness’ evoked by Neruda resonates with the time that we are currently moving through, in this, the second year of the pandemic. And it reminds me of what I want from art. In big life-changing ways, and in small ordinary moments; I want art to stop time, to disrupt context. To take me somewhere else, or to bring me home. Art’s objects are messengers bringing us news from nowhere, missives from other ways of thinking or being. They have a capacity to convey meaning which language cannot quite grasp, and thus they expand our range of expression. As potters, we are fortunate to work in a field where the possibilities for our objects to touch others are so direct and so expansive.

Collecting. I’m walking along the beach as a small child. Collecting pebbles. Collecting shells and crab claws. And then selecting the most beautiful— doing what Ellen Dissanayake describes as ‘making special’— and leaving the rest behind. It’s enthralling, and I wonder now about the adaptive purpose of this impulse and its connection to making art. Our aesthetic sensibility develops from a very early age through experiences like these: the picture book illustrations that will transport you to another place half a century after you first pored over them; the piece of music that lays open feelings buried and forgotten. There is a selection process at play here—sometimes our interactions with everyday objects leave deep imprints.

Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combination of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.
—Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Italo Calvino

Select, collect, and keep. Verbs that talk about how we relate to objects. Words that are adjacent, but with differing nuances. ‘Collecting’ has a tinge of the acquisitive, the greedy, the commercial. Our innate instinct to collect can be manipulated and used to coerce us into thinking that we need things that we patently don’t, and into spending our precious resources on the accumulation of stuff. When the objects turn out to be unsatisfying we churn through them. To collect is not the same as to keep. ‘Keep’ is a word with many uses: I can keep something for you, or from you. I can keep you from harm. For me, ‘keep’ imparts a feeling of intention and protection, of strength. Keep is a decidedly satisfying word.

What are the subtleties that set one object apart from another? I am curious about this because I have a sense that they relate to the desire I have when I am making work to get across the line where a cup becomes a piece of art. That line. Where something that we have becomes something that we keep. When I am teaching, I want to be able to talk around that line. To bring the deeply personal subjective experiences of each of us into a common language so that they become part of our shared learning.

The story of the Kizaemon Ido tea bowl is useful in this conversation. A humble, anonymous rice bowl has become a priceless piece of art through processes of selection, collection, and keeping. What are the physical and aesthetic qualities of this object that have made it possible for this transformation to be believed in by so many?

Another story: preparing for a class one morning and looking for a photo of the same famous tea bowl, I stumble across a ‘visually similar’ image on a WordPress blog called Artevident. The author explains... ‘When I last visited my 92-year-old artist father, I was struck by the beauty of his painting cup, a common ordinary plastic cup he has used since 1969. As I held it, the Kizaemon bowl came to mind. Paint drips from over the decades created a glazed patina’. When asked about the cup, her father tells her that it was given to him by her mother as she lay dying in hospital. This story tells us that that the context of collection can confer meaning on an object, that it can act as a memento of a time, place, or person (or all three); that its purpose or usefulness can increase the likelihood of it being kept; and that the decision to keep something can add to, as well as recognise, the gravity of that object. Of course, the appeal of this particular ordinary object is not as open, as broad, as the appeal of our famous tea bowl. The witnesses to its elevation are few, but I think the lesson holds. The story is also a reminder to us potters that the beauty of our material alone is not enough to create value in our objects. The assumption that ceramic always trumps plastic is lazy; a mass-produced plastic custard cup can be well designed, useful, long-lived, and even precious. We have to make our objects, our pots, good enough. When I make something that is good enough to be loved and kept by even one person, I am satisfied

Imagine that you are forced to fit all that you own, no, all that you choose to keep, into a car. During the recent bushfires in southeast Victoria, a friend had to do this, leaving behind things collected over a lifetime. Talking to her (over birthday cake, at the party of a three-year-old niece; memorable for being one of the few celebrations that I have attended in this strange still time), her ensuing sense of loss and rootlessness was palpable. But she talked of freedom as well. Endings and beginnings. This is all to say, that nothing is fixed and that the pain of loss, whilst inevitable, is tempered with the opening up of new possibilities. Our possessions can hold us and they can weigh us down, so it pays to be mindful about what we keep. The same can be said for the objects that we make.

Loss can be a progenitor of nostalgia, an impulse that I am temperamentally suspicious of. I can find looking back stifling, stultifying. Nostalgia is a seductive liar, I’m told. But right now, the past, and the things that will never be the same again, seem to be creeping up behind me, tapping insistently on my right shoulder. The way we lived two years ago feels like a different age. I am thinking about what we have all left behind and I am thinking about what I have left behind. and what I have kept, I’m looking for clues about what will be important to keep by me in the time to come. And wondering how the momentous changes we are living through will change the way I work.

So I am looking more closely at the things I have around me. Knowing that their presence is not incidental, it’s not without thrust. They tell me about my past, and how I am constructing my future. My sensuous involvement in the world, in this case in my entanglements with objects, is rich ground for experiential knowing. Attending to these perceptions provides clues about what art is to me. A way of navigating that line.

I wake in the morning looking out to the east through the branches of a large tree. Sunrise is a constant.