PLOW TURNS

My favorite part of an airplane ride...almost the only part I really enjoy that is specific to the plane itself and not a distraction from the rigors of travel...is the short time after the plane dips below the cloud layer upon descent but is still fairly high up. The patchwork of neighborhoods and aerial views of fields are fascinating to me as a two-dimensional abstraction of the ground. There's an ideal height before the resolution becomes so high that I really get drawn into the details of what we are gliding past...the distance allows the larger pattern to be the primary feature.

However those details can be very surprising when you do see them. I was once landing at the Dayton International Airport, flying home for Christmas and absorbing the texture of snowy yards and barren fields when I was struck by a flourish at the edge of a particular plowed field. Acres of straight rows were stacked next to one another, each pair connected by a semicircular cap dug as a plow snaked up and down the field. But at the corner there was a loop. Flying past the field I didn't quite comprehend what I was seeing but I immediately saw potential for patterned clay surfaces. I'm constantly seeing “potential for patterned clay surfaces” so usually I have to wait and to find out if a particular idea will stick around long enough to get fired into the side of a mug.

Some days later found me searching the internet for an explanation. I'm not always great at choosing search terms and was really fixated on the idea of “plow turns” which are a thing but not the thing I was looking for. I also think the internet is better for some tasks than others. If you want to find out about the cutting edge or high tech sectors of the world, articles and forums and social media are flooded with information. Interesting ways to plow a field are probably a little less novel and perhaps more often learned by word-of-mouth standing in a field or reinvented as yet another driver finds themselves plowed into a corner. However, even if its sort of not an internet thing and I am doggedly looking for the wrong version of it, I can usually find the info I need if I try long enough. “Ways to plow a field” was not the exception.

In this case the technical details of plowing fields are irrelevant. If the goal is texturing the side of a mug or vase I can move pretty quickly away from the practical considerations of a farmer prepping land for planting In the end the patterns created in the headlands of a plowed field have constraints that I don't need. There are no concerns about fully filling the plot with straight uniform rows or moving the cast off dirt in a particular direction. I can have more turns, fewer rows, even no real rows, and any number of flourishes that make no sense in the practical. In my head though these patterns are now all categorized as plow turns. Inspiration can be a winding road. A barely glimpsed corner of a farm in Ohio has created a series of motifs that I'm still working through a couple of years later.

I had played around with these ideas a bit and was just beginning to produce a small body of work last march when the pandemic shut down my community studio at MIT. This studio is still closed almost a year later and I’m sure there are pots in various unfinished stages to be dealt with whenever it reopens. These ideas have morphed again and come out in other work but I recently started playing around with that unfinished line of thought at Indigo Fire where I teach. Its almost like a mental checkbox that needs to be filled. I need to complete at least a few more pieces before I can really move on.

Borrowed Nostalgia

Christmas 2020 was the first I have ever spent away from my family in Ohio. As a result most of my Christmas traditions revolve around that week or so that I would normally have been at home. Left to my own devices I don't do much to decorate or personally celebrate the holiday. There is a lot of communal celebration, parties and church services etc, but my apartment doesn't usually reflect the season. Often helping to put a few more ornaments on the tree when I arrive home is the only decorating I do for the year.

So this year, having decided to stay in Boston because of travel restrictions and health concerns for everyone involved, I started drawing ornaments one night. Every family Christmas tree is a little different, but in my family the tree is all nostalgia. Every ornament that actually makes it out of the box is chosen because its someone's favorite. Most can be traced to a specific person who gifted or made the ornament and many are also decades old. We often don't even bother with the more generic ornaments, just picking out the favorites and spreading them around the tree.

When I started drawing ornaments I started with a few favorites that came to mind. There's a strange plastic monkey covered in a soft furry layer that my dad found on his way home from work one night. It wears a sash, a huge pink hat and holds a large plastic rose in both arms with a look on its face as if its objectively happy or in love. The weirdest little ornament, found in a gutter, is the one everyone wants to hang each year. My great grandmother made a lot of our ornaments and one of my favorites is a plastic canvas Rudolph whose head is an empty cube that holds a piece of candy you can find by squeezing on its cheeks. The list goes on.

Eventually my drawing led me to reach out to friends and family to share their favorite ornaments or even just ideas for ornaments they would like to see. Each story is a little different...the ornament their siblings fought about for the privilege of hanging; those made by children and grandparents; the one attached to a memory. More than one friend told me their families hide a tiny pickle ornament on their tree to be found in a search...it turns out this is a German tradition. I had a long conversation, including many texted photos, with my family so the ornaments that speak to me of Christmas are very well-represented. I also traced all my Christmas cookie cutters, a gift from one of my sister's last year that is just a sample of the larger family collection, and turned those into full characters.

In a odd and often disconnected year, any point of connection holds a little more value for me. Being able to reminisce with those close to me (even though they are far away) over long-held memories that get renewed each year when an ornament is removed from its storage box was a highlight of this year's Christmas.

Kimchi making

I get into a lot of projects using this crock but I call it my kimchi pot because that was its original intention. I didn’t have anything big enough to hold a whole head of nappa cabbage just cut into a few chunks until I made this pot.