There is something alive in the action of making.

It is a rhythm to itself that simply floods over me.

It is more than just a flow, it’s more than a torrent, it’s a whole ocean squeezing through the cracks of my frontal lobes that brings me to this moment. I feel it gushing out onto the forms before me. I feel it in my stretched hands pulling on clay that's way too dry. I should have known better to not use this bag of Keenes paperclay but it doesn't matter now. The yearn to create is here, so therefore I am here too. I don’t know what calls me to this worker's throne; it is something that can’t be explained, only felt.


To participate in the practice of making you are actively participating in the perspective of considering matter. When we create we might consider what we are making, is it a sentence? An image? A pancake? An atomic bomb? All these forms extend from what the materials can afford. We make pancakes on Shrove Tuesday because our milk and eggs will go off over lent and we make bombs out of uranium and hydrogen because international power politics require the highest megaton yields.

Materials afford us choices. Materials afford us options.

Sweet syrups or fallout fields? Take your pick.


The first thing I choose when I feel this creative itch is the material. The material dictates the rest of the process. Materials dictate the forms, the grooves, but most of all they dictate the channels of my own mind. Each of us are drawn to work with certain materials and in that process we find ourselves altered. Any person who knows a pastry chef from a line cook can attest that those are two very different mindsets and two very different personalities.


Yes, we can alter the materials through our outlooks and decisions, but more importantly those materials change OUR outlooks. Much like most pairs in life it's a dialogue between agents corresponding and reacting to each other. Matter and mind always enter into a lively discourse whenever something is “made” into existence. There are no more atoms in the universe after we finish “making” and yet there is one more “object”, for me that simple statement carries more mystical weight than any of the meditations brewed up in Descartes’ lonely cave. I know, I know, a clay-imbued maker throwing shade at the founder of “dualism”, it's a cliche I know but sometimes I like to partake in cliches.


The practice of making something is not unique to artists, making extends to all of us. But perhaps us artists are the ones you hear getting the most lyrical about it. For me the worded reflections of making are as much as part of the process as the drying clay I leave on my work station. I always feel so attuned to my inner dialogue after gripping clay for a few hours. It’s like returning to your own keyboard after using others, it just feels natural, the keys feel like they should be where they are and the sentences just start to flow on top of each other. I could dive into explanations, like how the regions of the brain’s language production and physical manipulation overlap but like any singular fact it’s never the whole sticky truth.


Our minds have come into existence through becoming stimuli sensing forms. The smell, the touch, the taste, all of it is there to extend our own bodily sensations out into the material universe and the universe into our bodies. What a dialogue and what a dance we get to partake in!


The summoning of spirits into our material realm occurs with each brushstroke and each chisel. I cannot say whether that urge to create comes from the sparks in my brain or the glints of distant stars.

I can only say I feel it here. In me.