contemporary pottery, ancient techniques
Wendy Peck
That's me ... Web designer by trade, and potter by obsession.
My
formal training is in Fashion Design, but I leapt over the fence from
fibre to graphics design as soon as the first desktop publishing programs
were available. I've made my living at a keyboard since 1989, moving
to Web design in 1997. I'm career contented, working from an office
in my home in Winnipeg. I've recently moved from my long-term residence
on a small lake in Northwestern Ontario. I was immersed in, and continue
to be viscerally influenced by the granite, water and endless forest
of the Canadian shield. The image at the left is a watercolour painting
I did of one of my favourite scenes in this area -- my canoe on a remote
portage.
Since I started with clay in 2001, I have been attracted to the exacting, but primitive methods originating in Mexico. In 2002, I travelled to Colorado to learn the Mata Ortiz tradition of black-fired and polychrome pots. My instructor, Michael Wisner, spent over a decade studying with Juan Quesada, one of the world's foremost experts in the technique.
Today,
I follow the hand-built construction and finishing techniques, and often
the painting. I also love to carve the black pots, taking great pleasure
in the extra texture carving provides. The painting is done with a hand-made
human-hair brush, challenging to control, but delivering extremely fine
details.
I sit beside a wheel while I spend hours working by hand with coils, striving for the perfection that comes so easily on the wheel. But these primitive methods demand hand-made forms. I can't explain the logic, just know that I take no pleasure in creating a form on the wheel to be finished in this way.
My feet rest on glaze buckets as I work, and pieces rest on the kiln while they wait to be placed in the fire. Sometimes they break in the fire. At times the results are disappointing. But nothing the kiln and glaze can do provides the warmth and intimacy of a burnished pot. My theory is that there is nothing between you and the clay, and that is why these pots feel so good.
I
alternate between carved or painted forms, and plain forms that are painted
by sawdust and copper at the bottom of a bonfire. My favourite pots are
always from the last bunch out of the pit.
Primitive pottery provides me with the perfect antidote to a work day that is spent creating art that essentially does not exist. My work is fleeting at best, existing only as electrons. An argument can be made that it really does not exist. In contrast, pottery is one of the most lasting substances on earth. We've learned much about those who have gone before us from shards of pottery. Pottery that was created in exactly the same way as my pots. My Web work may disappear like the morning mist, but my pottery will mark my place on the earth for centuries. I like that idea, and work hard to make sure each pot is worthy of that permanence.
Oh yes, and all intelligent discussion aside, playing in the mud is as satisfying today as it was when I was five. The best things in life don't ever change.
