Parker Posey on Pottery and Wheel Throwing

“In the early aughts…I learned something that ought not to have been so difficult: pottery.”

Parker Posey’s 2018 memoir You’re on an Airplane is full of anecdotes, observations, and a chapter on her wheel throwing practice. She details how she studied at the La Mano ceramic studio in NYC, learning about clay bodies, wedging, centering and how to start pulling walls and throwing. Her description is surprisingly technical, but if you think of the book’s premise of Posey sitting next to you on an airplane telling you her life story, it makes sense.

On centering, she writes:

Your hand is listening now, keeping your mind’s eye centered as you push it down with the heel of your palm, still using your strength. You’re raising the phallus at the base and then pushing it down to the center of the wheel. It goes up, then it goes down; it goes up, then it goes down. It feels so amazing in your hands that you could do it for hours. It’s an erotic thing, what can I say?

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She continues with the sensuality theme later in the chapter, and links it to bigger themes:

In the beginning, throwing was the best—getting into the sensuality of the clay and centering for hours. My mind would go right to the stars and into the dirt and think about how we’re so disconnected from where things actually come from—that there’s so much more energy in things and objects than we give them credit for. I’d think of cavemen, and the first cavewoman who threw a pot from a kick-wheel. I’d think of how excited and pleased she must’ve been, how hairy her eyebrows were, or if one of her caveman friends ever threw a pot at her, how quick she was to duck out of the way and how fun that was for everybody. There was a time when vessels held offerings to the gods, and we know this because we’ve seen those pictures painted in the pyramids. We see now, in museums, how clumsy and childish those relics were.

All in all, a pretty interesting take on the practice of wheel throwing. Check out the book if you’d like to read more about Posey’s ceramics instructor, the pottery sculptures she created, and many stories and anecdotes from her life and career.

You’re On An Airplane by Parker Posey
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Here’s a short video interview of Parker Posey on the wheel from 2013.

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A Potter's Workbook by Clary Illian

“It is a wondrous thing that long after it has ceased to be necessary, people still want to make pots on the potter’s wheel.” — Clary Illian

A Potter’s Workbook by Clary Illian is one of the best resources on making pots. Published in 1999, the book is full of images, drawings, and texts that illuminate and illustrate the how and why of making pots. It’s one of my favorite pottery resources, and I regularly share photocopied sections of the book with my students.

With just over 100 pages and 12 chapters, the book is full of information but not overwhelming. It starts with a a few short essays on the ideas of pots and then proceeds to cover practical aspects of each part of a pot, such as the foot and neck (the “Beginnings and Endings” chapter), cylinders, pitchers, bowls, lids, and then a few chapters on training your eye and finding your own style and voice. There is much practical information, along with more theoretical questions, such as:

“What is the heart of the matter in pottery making? To call into being an object and to ask the object to have qualities that evoke in the viewer a sense of rightness, beauty, or vitality is to tinker with the divine. Making pots offers a constant challenge to search for the mysterious underpinnings of the physical world itself.”

This style of pottery making and thinking about pottery shows Illian’s roots as a functional potter in the studio potter or Mingei tradition espoused by Bernard Leach and others. Illian apprenticed with Leach in 1964-65 after her undergraduate studies at the University of Iowa. After her time in Britain with Leach, she returned to Iowa where she set up her own pottery. While many of her pot evoke Mingei forms, Illian often turns to playful illustration and decorations that put her own spin on handmade, functional pottery.

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The book is illustrated throughout with simple line drawings and black and white images of greenware pots, shot by photographer and potter Charles Metzger. As opposed to other books that mainly show fired pots, or pots as they are being made on the wheel, the studio shots of greenware really illustrate the ideas that Illian presents in the text and help bring forth the attention that is needed to make a successful pot.

The book ends with a short chapter-length essay called “Place” that focuses on aesthetics and the role of the potter in contemporary society. Illian writes:

“Potters occupy a special position as communicators because they straddle the visual arts and arts of living; they have one foot in the spiritual realm of artistic value judgements and one foot in the material world of utilitarian objects. A useful object that has been crafted with artistic standards in mind is doubly special and celebrates both how and where it will be used…The sensuous appeal of a unique mug is linked to a nurturing moment, a moment of repose before the demands of the day begin. Food, drink, and plants are so central to our daily lives, so charged with emotions of self-gratification, nurturance, and relationship to other human beings that the containers associated with them will always be objects of symbolic power.

Delving into the spiritual along with the practical is to my mind, a great way to explore the mystery and power of pottery making. This makes A Potter’s Workbook a wonderful addition to any ceramics library and highly recommended for any potter.

For more on Clary Illian, check out this post from Craft in America. In 2014, the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art published a monograph surveying Illian’s 50-year career.

Any thoughts on Clary Illian or A Potter’s Workbook? Let us know in the comments.

A Potter’s Workbook by Clary Illian
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A Few Images from the A Potter’s Workbook:

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Roger Herman Ceramics monograph

Roger Herman Ceramics is a massive, beautifully illustrated monograph of the Los Angeles artist’s ceramic work from 1997–2018. The book includes a short introductory essay by Matt Connors and page after page of ceramics, including exhibition installation shots.

Herman works intuitively with clay, but generally starts with wheel thrown forms that are stacked, cut, altered, and decorated. Often featuring bright underglaze colors contrasting with dark, glossy glazes, the pots range from small, handheld cup- or bowl-like pieces to massive vases, urn-like pots, and large platters. In exhibitions, these are displayed in groupings in bookcases, open shelving, on the wall, or on pedestals, often drawing power from the groupings and loose repetitions of forms or markmaking.

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Herman also employs many drawing and painting techniques, including inlay, scraffito, wax resist, oxide wash, and combinations of underglaze and glaze. Not bound by one style, some pots are abstract color fields while others are completely covered in figurative drawing. Often fired and refired, the pots exude a considered casualness that is also open, honest, and exuberant.

Originally a painter, this book shows that Herman’s 20-plus year investment in ceramics is not just a trifle; he is a contemporary master of the material who has pushed vessel-making and ceramics in new directions. The installation shots that include ceramics with his paintings show that there is a give and take in his practice that crosses mediums.

My only complaint with the book would be a complete lack of information on work titles, sizes, and dates. The book unfolds like a massive tumblr scroll and while full of very exciting pots, it’s hard to know when they were made or exhibited. But with that caveat, it’s a wonderful addition to anyone’s library and the lack of titles and words allow a real focus on the pots themselves.

Roger Herman Ceramics 1997-2018 was available exclusively through Arcana Books in Los Angeles for $95, 426 pages, signed, with an edition of 250. There are not always copies available used but try the links below.

See more of Roger Herman’s ceramics on his website

For a 2020 interview with Herman on Hyperallergic, click here.

A few images of the book

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You might also enjoy:

Lucie Rie monography by Tony Birks

Ben Okri: A Time For New Dreams

Amy Sillman on Painting

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Ceramic Podcasts from Hyperallergic

In summer 2019, the art blog Hyperallergic produced a 4-part podcast series on ceramics in conjunction with the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, Canada. All are worth listening to, as well as Hyperallergic’s other excellent podcasts in their Art Movements Podcast series.

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From Hyperallergic:

This four-part series is produced by Hyperallergic in conjunction with Canada’s national ceramics museum, the Gardiner Museum and its Community Art Space, a platform for experimentation and socially-engaged art.

The series will explore how ceramics plays a role in contemporary art, and how artists and curators are grappling with the complexity of the age-old medium that continues to excite artists and audiences today.

The podcasts:

Shary Boyle’s Exploration of the Fantastic and Political Lives of Clay, released July 23, 2019

The Largely Unknown History of Blackface in Canada, released August 7, 2019

Kent Monkman’s Mission to Decenter the Colonial Museum, released August 9, 2019

The History, Context, and Legacy of an Ancient Maya Plate, released September 3, 2019

Click here to see more posts in the inspiration category.

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Ben Okri: A Time For New Dreams

A Time for New Dreams, published in 2011 by Ben Okri, contains 22 short essays on poetry, art, magic, childhood, the future, hospitality, and new dreams. There’s also a piece of experimental prose on the the first African masks that Picasso encountered, which is recommended reading if you love Picasso or early Modernism. The whole book is a great read for anyone, especially those who are writing, composing, or making art.

I learned about the book from the profile of artist David Hammons published in December 2019 in the New York. Here’s a few sentences from that piece:

Ben Okri, a Nigerian-born poet and novelist who lives in London, learned, in 2014, that David Hammons wanted to meet him. Hammons had been deeply impressed by a collection of Okri’s essays called “A Time for New Dreams.” (In a Japanese restaurant last winter, Hammons wrote the book’s title on the paper that his chopsticks came in, handed it to me, and said, “I want you to read this.”)

Anything that David Hammons is endorsing is definitely worth checking out!

Below is the first section of A Time For New Dreams, by Ben Okri. (Shop the book at Amazon)

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Poetry and Life

1

Heaven knows we need poetry now more than ever. We need the awkward truth of poetry. We need its indirect insistence on the magic of listening.
In a world of contending guns, the argument of bombs, and the madness of believing that only our side, our religion, our politics is right, a world fatally inclined towards war — we need the voice that speaks to the highest in us.
We need the voice that speaks to our joys, our childhoods, and to the Gordian knots of our private and national condition. A voice that speaks to our doubts, our fears, and to all the unsuspected dimensions that make us both human and beings touch by the whisperings of the stars.

2

Poetry is closer to us than politics, and is as intrinsic to us as walking or eating.
We are, at birth, born into a condition of poetry and breathing. Birth is a poetic condition: it is spirit becoming flesh. Death is also a poetic condition: it is flesh becoming spirit again. It is the miracle of a circle completed, the unheard melody of a life returning to unmeasured silence.
Between birth and death what are our daily moments but a double condition that is primarily poetic: the odd conjunction between inner and outer, between that inner sense of timelessness and that outer evidence of transience.

3

Statesmen talk about matters of state; poets help us to resonate with the fundamental rhythm of life, the iambics of walking, the elliptical strophes of every unique way of talking, the mysterious pulse of living.
Poetry begins in us an inner dialogue. It suggests a private journey to one’s own truth.
Let us bring together the voices of poetry from all over the world, and make our hearts a festival, a dreaming place, and our minds an academy of essentials under the stars.

4

Poetry is not just what poets write. Poetry is also the great river of soul-murmurings that runs within humanity. Poets merely bring this underground river to the surface for a moment, here and there, in cascades of sound and suggested meaning, through significant form.

5

The ancient oracles may be silent; and we may no longer believe in the many ways that the gods speak to us, or through us. But living means that we are the focus of many pressures: the demands of society, the strange pressures of being itself, of yearnings, inexplicable moods, dreams, and of feelings powerful with all the currents of mortal life.

6

We concentrate too much on our differences. Poetry returns us to the surprise of our similarities. It brings us back to the obscure sense that we are all members of a far-flung family, sharing feelings both unique to us and oddly universal.
We need more poetry than politics. But we need to constantly raise the possibilities of poetry. Poetry will not necessarily change the world. (Tyrants have been known to be poets, that is to say bad poets.) But so long as our poetry sends our minds into realms of gold and questions, and touches our deep and tender humanity, then it will always be a force for beauty, for good, in the world, neutralizing slowly the noise of guns and hatred.

7

The reason for the exalted condition of poetry is simple. Poetry is a descendant of the original word which mystics believe gave the impulse for all creation.
Poetry, at its highest, has alive in it, even in homeopathic doses, the creative power of the universe. Poetry incarnates that which shapes, changes, transforms. It makes something from what seems like nothing. How insubstantial words are! Who can weigh a word on a scale, even against a feather of truth? And yet see how much words weigh in the heart, in the imagination, in dreams, echoing down the ages, as durable as the Pyramids. Words, lighter than air, are as mysteriously enduring as lived time. Poetry hints at the godlike in us, and cause us to resonate with high places of being.

8

Poets want nothing from you, only that you listen to your deepest selves. Unlike politicians, they don’t want your votes.
True poets just want you to honour the original pact you made with the universe when you drew your first breath from the unseen magic in the air.

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Excerpted from A Time For New Dreams, by Ben Okri, originally published in 2011.

If you haven’t read anything by Ben Okri and you enjoyed this, you might also want to try his masterful novel The Famished Road.
Click here to find The Famished Road at bookshop.org

Click here to find at Amazon

Click here to find at abebooks

Filed under #inspiration, our first in a series of posts on inspirational texts for artists and makers. For more posts, click here.

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