bob's thoughts, images, feelings
and then some
During the first few years of throwing pots, finishing them, drying, bisqueing, glazing, firing — almost praying, everything is so unknown, finding a pot at the end of the process is a wonder beyond excitement. Much thanks to everything that made it possible. I loved it deeply!
So intriguing: the adventure of emulating magma, genesis, birth: — protoclay eggs/granite eggs — wowie zowie.1 Featured image above: three steps in the process.1. Ceramics: Art and Perception/Technical, Issue #117, summer 2021, pp. 142-147. Bob kavanagh’s Article discussing protoclay.
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…
In the current era, we contemporary humans consider ourselves fortunate to have a much richer and more realistic understanding of what things are, what reality is, and what the natural world is about, than any of our forebears. Most of this new and developed understanding is generally attributed to the development of science, scientific methodologies,…
Oh, dear! Let us act and think, pretend, just for a moment, that ‘matter’ is constituted slightly in the vein of the standard model a particle physics. And now let’s act as if a potter — I, the potter — develops an idea for a new shape, a new form, a new foot, a new…
So, as you may gather, I am still trying to figure out how to pose a question, which I find to be one of the more important questions in understanding how human beings function in daily life. I pose this question in the context of a potter’s creative act of making a pot: wedging clay…
Nests: Creative drift As we move fall along and get ready for winter, the garden becomes more than tranquil. When we walk into it (it’s actually Ursula’s garden), there is a white-ish, pale extrusion on the left : I call it part of the creative drift of life. On the right-hand side of the garden,…
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…
In my general feeling about being a living creature, my enthusiasm and my prayed-for insights rest most deeply in the spirit of life, the aura of life, the profound mystery of life’s coming to be at all. What I take as an almost-hidden fact is that life emerged from non-life. Although my sensibilities are enveloped…
Generally speaking, when human beings investigate something, trying to grasp what it is, or looking for evidence about its origins or nature, we accept that they are looking in a world which is more or less available to most people to look at, see and understand. We are all human we humans!Of course, by the…