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…
analyze-understand 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…
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…
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…
Simply complex: 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. The questions are normal, responses usually obvious if the visitor’s eyes are open, but……
What are you making? What are you doing? What is going on here? Such simple questions: hold your breath, congestion is coming! Human language is pregnant with innumerable subtleties of meaning and embryonic intent, and a modest amount of familial coherence and confusion, all accompanied by a modicum of silliness. Humans often lose their way…
natural/supernatural :: feet/gods a few simple statements: i can do no other There is no god: there is no spiritual hierarchy or apparatchiks, no minor gods, no angels, demons, devils, hell, or any of the other hidden ghost-like apparatus, usually invoked as regulating the affairs and consequences of human action. Incidentally, there is no heaven….
One goal, many paths. If only this aphorism were as true as its popularity suggests, or perchance, if only it were as clear as its simplicity suggests. Perhaps, then, this — or any — life would surely be simpler and more manageable! As if our life were actually only a mountain for which there were…
Language talking about language and thought thinking about thought: whew, and here I thought I knew something! Current language use and the interconnectedness of today’s words with their deep and mythic, interwoven history, are a very rich ground for the complexity of the meanings and the functions of the words we use. Simultaneously, they tacitly…
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…