mel jacobson on fri 28 jan 05
remember kathy, you are a well organized
woman potter.
it says it all.
mel
and, she can cook, do computers and everything.
mel jacobson/minnetonka/minnesota/usa
http://www.pclink.com/melpots
http://www.rid-a-tick.com
Kathy Forer on fri 28 jan 05
Dear Mel,
Your email makes me feel rather tricephalic. As I'm sure it also does
Kathy and Kathi.
Be that as it may, and Janet over in Wales there, can explain what I
mean, I would be honored and delighted thinking of myself as a potter.
Even though much of what I do with clay, except sharing the various
stages of beginning, recycling and ending, doesn't quite fit in the
label, it's balancing to own to an accessible affiliation and friendly,
flexible profession, if only for pretend if not production, while I
play at being an artist, at being and nothingness, at clay fluximation.
What's the tax category?
CLAY : POTTER ::
(A) stone : sculptor
(B) machines : mechanic
(C) hems : tailor
(D) bricks : architect
(E) chalk : teacher
Cooking works when I'm hungry or have someone to feed.
Computers work usually, not just when I sit in the chair without legs
and barely any arms, eyelids propped open like Malcolm McDowell in "O
Lucky Man!" But it took the variable distance of a wireless laptop for
me to figure that out; and the reluctance to sit at the screen in the
studio but to bend over the desk chair in a temporary posture.
If I can recycle string and even plastic bags, darn if I'll let clay
scraps go to waste. Quilts and embroidery will just have to wait.
From a smart olding tart,
Kathy/Locust
Ellen/NJ
Forer/USA
On Jan 28, 2005, at 6:05 PM, mel jacobson wrote:
> remember kathy, you are a well organized
> woman potter.
> it says it all.
> mel
> and, she can cook, do computers and everything.
> mel jacobson/minnetonka/minnesota/usa
Kathy Forer on sun 30 jan 05
p.s. Apologies to the other Kathie's, Kathryn's and Kathleens,
multi-cephalic would have been more appropriate than mere tricephalic.
But I saw the opportunity to use Janet Kaiser's $10 word in everyday
conversation and jumped at it.
While I'm aware it was most likely Kathi LeSueur to whom Mel was
referring as a "woman potter," and I was teasing about it in a rather
too-obtuse way, there is something special about the focus on pots and
pure form that can round out a clay studio.
We all do our studio things more or less by ourselves, surrounded by
our history, our needs and the particulars of our environment. We have
outside connections with our friends and family, our employers, our
community and peers and the various things and people which influence
us. We can work at the peak or valley of a tradition or in the merging
of various new ideas and strains, but there's always a relation.
To see how various crafts and disciplines are interrelated provides for
more options and more questions, deepening our experience and
expression. The scope of art history is often marked out by the
primitive, the classical, the renaissance, modernism and contemporary,
with various transitional periods. When we look to our own place in the
world, we define our understanding in relation to that history, to our
received and experienced knowledge.
There's a world of clay modeling between Giacometti and Brancusi,
between Henry Moore, Isamu Noguchi and Elie Nadelman, but the Cyclades,
Bernini and Duchamp all serve to help us develop a relational topology
and conversation. So too does pottery own or contain a large body of
formal sense, technical tradition and a production and functional
imperative that can center and balance an open-ended
post-post(?)-modernism and nearly limitless technology.
Perhaps even the computer and its silicon technology will influence
pottery, a perceptual opposite, in new ways.
That's the way I see it anyhow.
Kathy Forer
Locust, NJ
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