“It is not the pots we are forming, but ourselves.” — M. C. Richards
Centering In Pottery, Poetry, and the Person by M. C. Richards is a pottery classic but also a great read for anyone interested in making, writing, and creating. First published in 1964, it remains Richards’s most popular work, a defining text of the time, and is a still relevant today.
Centering in Pottery, Poetry and the Person by M.C. Richards
Richards was a poet, essayist, and potter who first learned about clay at the famed Black Mountain College in the 1940s and 50s. She went on to teach and make pots, with the goal of using the malleability of clay to inform how people saw themselves. She was free-spirited and embraced an interdisciplinary approach to art and teaching long before it was fashionable to do so. In the book Live Form, Jenni Sorkin calls Richards an “enlightened amateur” who valued process over skill, and placed more value on experience than finished objects. She usually gave away or sold her ceramics for very low prices, and encouraged students to make clay forms and then recycle them or return the clay to the ground.
Sorkin cites Richards’s 1958 event Clay Things to Touch, to Plant in, to Hang Up, to Cook in, to Look at, to Put Ashes in, to Wear, and for Celebration as one of the earliest happenings and a prime example of Richards’s approach to making art. The show was just the one-night opening and clay and ceramic objects were sold or given away, prefiguring later happenings by Allan Kaprow or projects such as The Store by Claes Oldenburg. This event had the same spirit of Richard's’s teaching and Sorkin writes: “In guiding students toward non-object, process-based production, such as returning unfired clay to the ground after making a collective pot, Richards treated pottery as a secondary to its process. In this way, Clay Things anticipates the collectivity and vitality of socially engaged artistic practice fifty years later. . .”
Live Form: Women, Ceramics and Community by Jenni Sorkin
In Live Form, Sorkin devotes a chapter-length essay to Richards, along with chapters on Susan Peterson, Marguerite Wildenhain, and the Black Mountain Pottery Seminar. Live Form is a highly recommended read (one of the best books on ceramics) and makes a great companion to Centering. The idea of centering, whether on the potter’s wheel or in life, is the root of Richards’s book, and allowed her to spin off in many directions.
Richards writes: “As human beings functioning as potters, we center ourselves and our clay. And we all know how necessary it is to be “on center” ourselves if we wish to bring our clay “into center” and not merely agitate it or bully it.”
She also turns to wider themes of making:
“The creative spirit creates with whatever materials are present, with an umbrella, or a wineglass, or a torch. We are not craftsmen only during studio hours. Any more than a man is wise only in his library. Or devout only in church. The material is not the sign of the creative feeling for life: of the warmth and sympathy and reverence which foster being; techniques are not the sign; “art” is not the sign. The sign is the light that dwells within the act, whatever its nature or its medium.”
Centering is great read and highly recommended for anyone interested in clay, pottery, or the creative process. The book is also densely packed with great quotes. Here are just a few:
M. C. Richards Quotes
“Poetry often enters through the window of irrelevance.”
“In order to teach, you must be able to listen.”
“You don’t need me to tell you what education is. Everybody really knows that education goes on all the time everywhere all through our lives, and that it is the process of waking up to life.”
“It is not the pots we are forming, but ourselves.”
“I believe that pots have the smell of the person who makes them: a smell of tenderness, of vanity or ambition, of ease and naturalness, of petulance, uncertainty callousness, fussiness, playfulness, solemnity, exuberance, absent-mindedness. The pot gives off something. It gives off its innerness, that which it holds but which cannot be seen.”
On copying:
“Some craftsmen seem to be troubled by the question of originality and imitation. My only standard here is that a person be led into a deeper experience of himself and his craft. Human beings learn by imitation; certainly, in the years of childhood, almost exclusively by imitation. One is inspired by someone else’s example”
“It is the physicality of the crafts that pleases me: I learn through my hands and my eyes and my skin what I could never learn through my brain. . . And if it is life I am fostering, I must maintain a kind of dialogue with the clay, listening, serving, interpreting as well as mastering.
Add the books to your library:
Centering in Pottery, Poetry, and the Person by M.C. Richards
Buy at amazon.com
Buy at abebooks.com
Live Form: Women, Ceramics, and Community by Jenni Sorkin
Buy at bookshop.org
Buy at amazon.com
For more posts on books, podcasts, and studio inspiration, click here.
