As Promised - A Few 2008 Pots
It seems 2008 was the year of experimental shapes. The freedom and immediacy of hand building allowed me to try out all sorts of designs. I like the simplicity of using just my hands as tools (although the holes were made with a hole punch tool). I'm posting these pictures of the wet clay pots because there is something wonderfully promising about unfired ceramics; the earthiness, the satisfaction of duplicating a process known to mankind for thousands of years...they're alive somehow, until all the moisture evaporates, and then they are never quite the same (smaller, obviously, and even smaller once fired).
This also seems like a good place to publish my 'chop'. I made this 'chop' in 2007 out of plaster, instead of carving it in soapstone, but it seems to work just fine; and almost all my pots made since have this 'chop'. I'm putting 'chop' in quotations, because I am a little unsure of the word. It was not used at all in Japan, as far as I could tell, and seems to be an American word to describe the pot's identifying marks. I'm puzzled about this and will need to do more research. The 'chop' in Japanese ceramics could be identifying the artist, the kiln, the date, the city, or the type of clay, making translation very difficult...But then they also have Japanese ceramic jargon for each part of the actual vessel (the shape, color, finish, design of the feet, the concave parts, the convex parts, the rim, etc.) which we simply have not developed as extensively as part of our language. Anyway, I think it is appropriate to simply refer to this mark as my signature, since it is just an 'M'.
The pots are not pictured to scale, and range in size from mame to shohin.
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