bob's thoughts, images, feelings
and then some
This pot is as hard as rock. I take its structure to be somewhat ethereal because it just happened to come to be. It didn’t exist and then it did. I made it as this particular thing-form, with my manipulative hands immersed in clay on the potter’s wheel in my studio. It could have been…
Researchers have shown that humans were making fired clay objects (diverse figurines) many millennia ago (central Europe, circa 30,000 years). There were pots and food-related objects known to be made about 14-16,000 years ago (Japan) and in what today we call the near east and Egypt, about 10,000 years ago. These objects were created by…
A bowl is such a simple object: open, balanced, a spatially-structured circle, a foot, a lip, a receptacle. But to make a bowl is an adventure and a loving challenge. It is difficult to visualize labourers whose artistry is more immediately sensuous than that of potters shaping supple, moist and plastic clay as it spins…
metamorphosis: plastic molecules? From the rocky mountains clay has flowed—time beyond imagining, and when fired in the potters’ kilns, clay re-transforms to stone. Clay is occasionally called a hydrated alumino-silicate. Calm down, this will be brief and may actually be informative. To place these words into context one could say that clay is an earth…
Beginnings of things are not always evident when we look only at the thing about which we have uncertainty, a query or an inclination to explain or somehow make clear. Quite often in human affairs, our attempts to account for and explain a current state, takes into account a limited version of the entity, skipping…
zero:time/space: but, here/now: there/then? (holy smokes, Batman, even the Batmobile isn’t fast enough) Light escaping; captured at the edge: no edge to everything, but light, what are you doing here? What is there, but what is? Is not existence everything? Surely, not two all existences! Am I not something?
The deeper dialogue with the devil is most frequently that agonizing personal insight. It is so often a couched self-deception—felt, yet known—which has slipped into the mist-shrouded realms of our consciousness. We know through a glass darkly, that the agony is real and sweeping through our soul as we live each day. This intimate, destabilizing…
A zygote’s coming to be, is far past the origins of its being. The cessation of life is a moment further down what we call its path of life. Fullness is the activity between the two. Fullness is not not fraught with hazards aplenty — which are not unaccompanied by enrichment, growth and learning. Straight…
What are you making? What are you doing? What is going on here? Such simple questions which are asked in one form or another by almost all visitors to a potter/clay artist’s studio when the artist is at work. It is a question which appears ready for a straightforward answer: hold your breath, congestion is…