Feb 17-19, 2006
Leave your usual life for an unforgettable experience. With clay in our hands, we’ll enter a tactile world where thoughts and feelings find form in streams of images that surface like the ever-present mystery of life.
Expect to talk, touch, and wonder. Expect life to show up as usual, though it might seem different. Expect guidance, freedom, playfulness, technical questions, chaos, order, and whatever else. The momentum may include extremes from stillness to creative frenzy. The materials will help us stay grounded ... it’s their nature.
Centering ourselves in place and time, we’ll explore ocean-floor sediments from Joan’s collection taken by ships for oceanographic research, some from two miles down. The sediments come from deep ocean corings, usually available only to scientists. We’ll see samples of unfired and fired sediments from many seas, rock slurry from Earth’s crust, and granules from a hydrothermal vent. We’ll notice small shells, which settle into sediment layers and give researchers clues to climate history. These carbonate sources seem to lend magic when using the muds as ceramic glazes.
Generally, evenly applied ocean sediments, transformed by fire release greens, rusts, and rich browns that are unique, like fingerprints. Some melted sediments organize into patterns resembling branching trees, root systems of plants, river deltas, and radiate like dendrites of nerve cells. Joan said, “When I first saw the colors and patterns come out of the kiln, I laughed and cried at the same time.”
Martin Kemp of Oxford University said, “Lederman’s glazes have a life of their own. To cradle one of her vessels in one’s hands is an evocative, even eerie experience, akin to holding a fragment of meteorite or peering at a sample of moon rock.”
We’ll experience how earth, air, fire, and water obey natural laws, which may not be predictable or controllable. At another time and place, fire will bring our pieces to bright yellow heat (about 2325 degrees F.) in the kiln, where we can only imagine what happens. We will certainly see that what went in looks entirely different from what comes out.
You will be invited to do what Joan does, which is to record each piece with longitude, latitude, and depth of origin. After much mucking around, we’ll each choose one clay object to keep, to glaze, to pack for travel to Joan’s kiln, and then to be returned to you after it is fired.
No prior knowledge or experience with clay is needed, though experienced potters and geologists are welcome. There will be a materials/firing/packing/mailing fee of from $100 to $200, depending on the size of the piece you create. In return, you will receive an original piece of art, fashioned by your very own hands, transformed by fire. To learn more about Joan’s unusual work, go to www.thesoftearth.com. Rowe is honored to offer this rare opportunity, limited to 18 people, and hope you will join us.
Joan Lederman’s work indicates a means of transcending the boundaries that divide science from art, humanity from the rest of life. She calls herself a “potter and imagineer,” creating ceramic art that resounds across time and space. She studied fine arts, moved to Vermont, apprenticed herself to the Earth, designed and built her first studio, began making and firing pots, and moved to Woods Hole in 1974. There, she learned to obey the weather, respect the tides, appreciate impermanence, and say thank you a lot.
“I come to feel Gaia as a living breathing organism, like my self. This is our Earth speaking ... in a new form.”
— Joan Lederman