Pride (2021)

Take pride in your idol worship. Have faith in the clay, its ripples of silica, it's blocks of alumina.

 Praise be to the earth for its emerging forms. Worship your figures, worship your forms. 

Give them life with each veneration. It's the dedication to dwell on your own finger's creations that make a good piece of art great.

Let us sinfully indulge in the clay pits of earthly delights. 

It’s the dirt that we must cherish, for its bite and for its flow.

Venerate each mound of clay like it's Mother Mary. 

Kiss your terracotta beads and sing the clay’s prayer.

Devote yourself and say your vows,

not to the heavens above but to that sticky mud below. 

 

Sticky mud

Warm like skin and soft like toffee,

Easy to pull but hard to crack,

A pliable piece of parchment for us to play,

A memorable medium for us to mark meaning,

These silica sheets will sculpt your soft synapses.

They will lick to your knuckles and cling to your hair,

They will make your hands soft and your wrists sore,

Drawing you in as you open up,

Feel the matter enter your bloodstream,

Feel it pulse in your being.

Raw clay claws at the ripest thoughts and

Muddled concepts become draped in puddles of mud,

Creating ceramic forms we imagine cerebral figures,

We let the material become vitrified in the voices of our minds, 

To define yourself as a ceramicist is to let clay define you, 

To let clay give form to us as we have given form to it.