Locomotoring

I have always imagined myself to be a potter.

Couple decades ago, I had access to a wheel on and off for a few years. It turned out that I could only ever make heavy bottom pottery. By that I don’t mean pear shaped, I mean clay that lays heavy at the bottom of the pot. And my lump of clay was the master of me. If I wanted the clay to turn into a vase, it would turn into a bowl. When I wanted a bowl, it would want to be a mug. At first it was frustrating, then it became amusing. How often do you get your life lessons on the wheel? Failure on the potter’s wheel was my first experience with failure. Up until that time, I had assume that practice makes one perfect. No, no, no…. Practice is just that, at best, it is a form of meditation. Eventually this protagonist learned that she is good at a couple of things and bad at a very large number of things. She is good at not letting failure come in the way of passion. She also has a great imagination that is not limited by reality.

In that imagination, I own a studio in the Napa valley.

During the pandemic, my partner and I watched all episodes of The Great Pottery Throw Down. You are thinking that watching a wheel turn might be as mesmerizing as watching paint dry, but watching a wheel turn is also where I first learned about raku. Since that was a competition, the potters were being particularly imaginative, they used vegetables peels, feathers, flowers, pet hair and a whole lot more. Couple of years ago, I had attended Ruth Asawa’s installation of faces at the Cantor Art center. Next to the installation were three texturally rich beautiful clay vessels, named “the life vessels”, made by Ruth’s ceramicist son, Paul Lanier, on her request. In these vessels are embedded Ruth’s ashes along with ashes of her husband, Albert, and her son, Adam. Raku isn’t the same as embedding things into clay, it is about leaving impressions behind, a wisp of a memory.

Last two years, my hair wouldn’t stop falling. I was too pre-occupied to troubleshoot and had chalked it up to stress. But eventually, my scientist brain kicked in and I correlated the start of hair fall to post shampoo excessive scalp itching to a natural shampoo I had switched to. In addition to a number of plant derived chemicals, it carried a number of well meaning herbal extracts like ivy, soapbark, black walnut leaf and ginseng. I have now switched back to a more mainstream shampoo that is just full of good old chemicals, and the hair loss has stabilized.

I was losing over hundred hair a day. If they had the structural integrity of tumbleweed, they would have formed beautiful sculptures on their own and tumbled around our old wooden floors. What they did instead was just get everywhere, on jackets, in pockets, in corners of rooms, in between cushions, …. Most of them ended up in tight tangles in the rollers of my vacuum cleaner. But while they fell, I imagined the potter in me making horsehair raku pottery with my own hair.