Author: bob

featured image – condiment dish: porcelain 8 cm, multiple overlain slips, moon white satin glaze, cone 7+ oxidation So, if we were to pretend just for a moment, that matter is actually constituted slightly in the vein of the standard model of particle physics, the question which slips noisily into my foggy consciousness appears to…

It is often a simple and easy slope which leads us to forgetting the deep, physical, visual, emotional, and spiritual pleasure that comes to the heart of potters in the creative making of pots.Potters are  often thought of as craftspeople who make pots in order to make a living, and that is somewhat true —…

The creative miracle is really simple. There is no detailed plan in the receptacle of the mind which the practiced body replicates in the physical world: the world of clay, the world of things. Art does not copy what appears to the mind’s eye. It is rather the spirit’s material form in the common world…

Chains are, well, chains – whether they be chains of ones and zeros or leg irons, whether they be the order of logic or the constraint of emotion.  Grace is the immediate and direct presentation into human life of free and open abundance.The left and right columns encode the english expression “chained grace” twice; the…

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…

Let’s pretend we are potters in a studio about to (watch a potter) make bowls (always my favourite object). It appears we have a context within which we might be able to ask many questions. Context, however, is a labyrinth shrouded by mist not often seen.The balls of clay are at hand, to be thrown…

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,…