The earth has formed my body, and in turn, I form the earth. From the clay, bodies stretch forth – lengthening into necks and waists, settling into bellies and busts, twisting into shoulders and elbows. The fleshy, satin surfaces of wood-fired pots speak to me of skin. The body has emerged as a vocabulary in my recent work. Not one body in particular – just lines and forms reminiscent of the corporeal.
My biomorphic functional forms engage in discourse with one another on the kitchen table, the gallery pedestal, and the living room mantle. In the kiln, the placement of each piece in relationship to the others affects the surface of the finished vessel. It is in the same manner that communities of potters affect one another – we deeply influence one another, both in the pots we make and the ways in which we live our lives. Each interaction leaves its mark. Just as the kiln won’t hold the heat well if it isn’t packed full of pots, neither can it be fired without enough hands to split, stack and stoke. A community of wood-fire potters is essential to the completion of my work, and has become its subject, as well. Thus, these body-like pots are simultaneously symbolic and documentary representations of bodies in community.
Every interaction is born from inquiry. While throwing and building with it, my fingertips question the clay; through the translation of fire, the finished vessels are answer. The dialectical nature of the creative process is a unifying thread throughout the life of the pottery I produce. My hands, as the channel through which these forms came into being, will remain connected to them, entangled in this community of shared experience for a lifetime or more, long beyond the point when the last pot has been reduced to unremarkable dust and fully incorporated back into the earth.
susannah goodman 