Lost at Sea

My studio is on a hilltop garden overlooking the Salish Sea. I spend many hours at the ocean edge exploring the worlds within worlds that exist at the intertidal zone. This piece is inspired after an afternoon spent by the sea.

When this art(ifact) came out of the pit fire last week it wanted to be known as “lost at sea”.

I have been reflecting on how most of my life I felt lost at sea ~ in a disorienting world that did not make sense to me. It was when I ‘accidentally’** stumbled across Gaya Ceramic Art Center (GCAC) in Bali in 2016 that I began to feel more anchored in myself and connected to the world around me. 

I had just moved to Bali with my 16 year old daughter after my mom’s passing. It was a fertile time of grief in a culture that was so completely foreign to me. I signed up for a textile class at GCAC but when I arrived found out it was cancelled so I decided to try a beginners wheel throwing class instead. 

There was an immediate tactile magnetism to this material for me. One class turned into a workshop, which turned into the studio being a ‘home’ for me while in Bali for 2 years. I felt so enlivened by the whole process and the people I met from all over the world doing really amazing things with clay.

ln alchemy, prima materia, or first matter, is a formless primaeval substance regarded as the original material of the universe. I fully believe that when you find your prima materia the world comes to you ~ when it's not your prima materia it feels barren. 

There is a reciprocal relationship with clay where my response comes from the material. In other words, I do not impose my ideas and will onto the material but rather, I respond to the material ~ how it wants to be formed and shaped…what it wants to be…and that knowing is felt in my hands as my body is in contact with the clay. When I can effectively remove myself as the author of the ceramic form I remain as the agency of the form in the process of structuring itself and I am always surprised by what is formed and often don’t really ‘see’ it until it is complete. 

I have found what truly matters to me, my prima materia ~ my love ~ and am no longer lost at sea. Clay is singing me back to life and showing me how to love this world and how to be in a complex system where life is a constantly organizing system…

embodied/anchored and floating in a sea where I am always sea sick and learning to navigate without sea legs, in a world where there is perpetual noise (nausea) and uncertainty.

**Complexity suggests that not all order is accidental and is responsible for much of the spontaneous order seen throughout the world. According to Stuart Kaufman, if life were bound to arise, not as an incalculably improbable accident, but as an expected fulfillment of the natural order, then we truly are at home in the universe.

Pit Fire

Peeling back the metal corrugated covers to see treasures buried within.

Messenger

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

~ by Mary Oliver