Draw, Then Build

This spring I've been thinking about the relationship between a drawing and the thing that comes after it.

I taught Sculptural Handbuilding this winter at Wheelhouse Clay Center in Brattleboro, VT. I gave students an assignment that made several of them uncomfortable: draw the object first, then build it as drawn. Not approximately. Exactly. No letting the clay lead you somewhere more comfortable or more familiar. Stay true to the line on the page.

The resistance was immediate. Most of my students, all experienced throwers, said they felt less skilled in 2D, less expressive, less at home with a pencil than with their hands in clay. Drawing felt like a constraint rather than a permission. What surprised me is that this is, at least partly, the point. When you commit to building what you drew, you stop negotiating with the clay about what it wants to become. You have to anticipate its needs instead. You must build the internal armature before the form tells you it needed one. You have to hold the drawing in mind as a kind of contract.

I built a new series of pieces alongside the students using the same method. The process surfaced a question I'm still sitting with: what does it mean to reanimate something flat? To take a free, quick, expressive mark - a drawing made in a single breath - and reconstruct it in a medium that takes weeks, that dries and cracks and shrinks and argues with you? The drawing is frozen in that expressive moment. The clay is not. Getting from one to the other is a kind of reverse engineering I want to keep following.

And some days you really do need to follow what the clay’s lead. As a counter-point I spent a day with one directive in mind: run an entire bag of clay through the extruder and see what comes out. I'm not sure yet what these pieces are saying, or to whom. But they are clearly in conversation with each other, and some of them will be making their way to my next craft fair.

Glaze Work

The more methodical glaze work this season has been returning to a collection of old test tiles I love and beginning to map the research questions that will shape my GOOD Glaze retail line, coming soon. Revisiting which recipes hold up, which need reformulating, which colorants are doing what to the underlying chemistry.

I also taught my Exploring Glazes workshop. This three-weekend intensive in glaze chemistry offers fundamentals that always feels like a firehose, but generates the best questions. Students leave with new ways of seeing what's already in the glaze buckets in front of them at their own community studios.

Field Notes: Storm King

In early spring I took a research trip to Storm King Art Center in the Hudson Valley with a close friend. I went wanting to think about scale. I came away thinking about time.

*Ursula von Rydingsvard For Paul, 1990–92/2001 - detail
**Menashe Kadishman Suspended, 1977 - detail

What stays with me is the pace of it. You see a sculpture from a distance and have to walk toward it, slowly, over actual terrain. The form changes as you approach. What looked monolithic from far away reveals texture, material decision, the evidence of how it was made. You earn the detail by covering the ground.

We also gave ourselves permission to be fooled. In a park full of earthworks, where the boundary between art and landscape is deliberately unstable, you find yourself asking the question - is that art? - more than feels comfortable. Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes, despite the striking color and texture, it's just a fallen tree.

Current Inspiration

I am reading Mieke Bal's Moments of Meaning-Making: On Anachronism, Becoming, and Conceptualizing and Jennifer Higgie's The Mirror and the Palette: Rebellion, Revolution, and Resilience, 500 Years of Women's Self-Portraits.

Bal's central proposition - that meaning is made in the intervals, in the in-between - is one I worked with years ago when I was a postdoctoral researcher in Amsterdam, working through these same ideas with a Dutch information history and digital humanities scholar in a paper we wrote together. I had set that framework down for a long time. It is back now, and it feels different being expressed through clay in my hands rather than academic words on a page. The questions it raises are the same. What I bring to them is different.

Higgie's book moves in sections. The ones I keep returning to are: Smile. Allegory. Hallucination. Solitude. Translation.

Summer Plans

Something I can share, carefully: I am in the midst of signing a lease on a private studio space at the Cotton Mill in Brattleboro.

There are details still being worked out. The electrical, plumbing, and other fit-up work that makes a raw loft space into a ceramic production studio is a real lesson in managing people. I don't have keys yet. I'm in the in-between. The space is large. There are more rooms than I currently have plans for. Walking through it feel something like standing far from a sculpture you know you're going to have to walk all the way up to. Holding the distance, the effort it will take, the way it will look completely different when you're finally there all feels daunting and exciting at once.

Big things are in the works. Slowly, but surely.

Connect

Visit my websites at md-ceramics.com and good-glaze.com Follow my practice on Instagram @mdceramics.goodglaze​

2694 Creamery Rd, GUILFORD, VT 05301
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