The History of World Ceramics is as old as we are. Humans all around the world have been making pottery since our homo sapiens ancestors evolved, moved into caves, discovered fire, began practicing intentional burial, figured out how to use tools, and started migrating. At present, the oldest known ceramic work is the Venus of Dolní Vestonice, a figurine made between 29000 to 25000 BCE, found in the Moravian basin, in what is now the southeastern part of the Czech Republic. The oldest functional pottery vessels (beer jars?), found in Xianrendong Cave in China, are dated to around 20,000 years ago.
In 1975, while viewing The Exhibition of Archaeological Finds of the People’s Republic of China at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, I noticed the fingerprints of an early human, a potter, pressed into a clay pinch pot. The finger prints in clay were possibly 20,000 years old. Yet those impressions of fingers pressed into wet clay were so immediate, so present, that I felt as if the 20,000 year old potter could have been sitting next to me. It made me shiver. I profoundly felt the familial bond of all humankind.
Working with clay keeps me humble. Curiosity and a sense of humor help.
My personal potter’s journey, in this lifetime, began when I was in kindergarten. I was given sculpting clay and plaster molds, with which I made little figurines that occupied me in imaginative play for days on end. When I was about 10, my parents took me to see the outdoor play Ramona, a love story about Native Americans and Mexicans in early California — the official California state play, which has been continuously running in the little town of Hemet for 100 years. The play made a deep impression on me. And then, in the Ramona gift shop, I watched a Mexican potter demonstrating wheel throwing. I still remember my feelings of awe, fascination, and longing as I watched the spinning wet clay take shape magically in the potter’s hands. The potter didn’t speak English, but I immediately understood the universal language of potter and clay. He threw a perfect, gleaming, beautiful vase. Then, making pointed eye contact with me, he pushed and poked dents in the sides of the form, radically altering and transforming the pot’s perfection, while laughing with joy and mischievousness. I was shocked, disturbed, transformed. I know now that the hand of destiny led my parents to take me to Hemet that day.
Shortly after that experience, when I was about eleven years old, c. 1958, I was given my first opportunity to throw clay on the wheel, at the Los Angeles, California studio of my older sister’s friend, Mexican American potter Dora de Larios. Unknown to me at the time, Dora was a world famous potter, her work in the great museums and collections of the world. I didn’t realize until much later how her influence had permeated me to the soul, and guided the rest of my life journey:
“Despite her 40 years of achievement in the arts, De Larios remains a humble servant to her vision. She sees her work as a divine gift with which she has been blessed – – a lifetime of hard work coupled with the childlike joy of discovery. She is constantly in awe of the natural processes that allow her to create, from the earth’s churning of rocks and minerals into clay and glazes, to the flow of divine inspiration that transforms the clay into artwork through her hands.”
I pursued my study and practice of the potter’s art and craft at Mills College, under the great Antonio Prieto, and then at U.C. Irvine under architectural sculptor John Mason.
At the University of California, Santa Cruz, from 1976 to 1978, I underwent a rigorous apprentice-style Bachelor of Arts program in California Craftsman-style Ceramic Art, under master potter/painter, Al Johnsen, graduating with Honors in the Major. This beautiful film by Eric Thiermann and Joel Magen captures the magic of Al and his friends in the Santa Cruz Mountains: Bruce McDougal, Bruce Anderson, and Daniel Rhodes. CLAY – Living with the Process
Working with Al is beautifully described by another one of his many disciples, Ramah Commanday, as follows:
“In college, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, I finally begin learning to throw. My teacher, Al Johnson had been a devoted student of Marguerite Wildenhain, a Dutch-born, Bauhaus-trained potter who became one of the major founders of studio ceramics in this country. As Al brought ceramics classes from non-credit status to an essential part of a design program, he passed along Wildenhain’s disciplined choreography of throwing technique, and her unassailable Bauhaus forms to a generation of university students.
A Marguerite Wildenhain bowl made in the mid-1970s at Pond Farm, Guerneville, California. This stoneware with colored slip, glaze and sgraffito design was acquired by Barbara Brown and kept on display in her home until 2018. At that time Barbara asked Bill Geisinger to take custody of the bowl until it can be displayed to the public at a museum.
“Deeply influenced by Marguerite Wildenhain, and by Bernard Leach’s romantic marriage of Japanese and British functional pottery tradition, studio ceramics in seventies Northern California became an orthodoxy of reduction-fired stoneware and porcelain, with Leach’s A Potters Book as the Old Testament, and Daniel Rhodes’ Stoneware and Porcelain: The Art of High Fired Pottery, as the New. (n.b. Al and Rhodes met as MFA students at Alfred University and they ended up being friends and neighbors on Swanton Road in the Santa Cruz mountains. Another one of Al’s gospels was Pioneer Pottery by Michael Cardew.)
Daniel Rhodes glazed plate
Just north of Santa Cruz, Bruce and Marcia McDougal ran the Big Creek Pottery in an old dairy farm on a hilltop between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Cruz mountains. Their pottery and their partnership combined the free-spirited zeitgeist of the early 70’s, with a deep devotion to solid design and disciplined craftsmanship. I spent my 20th summer, one of a dozen students, at a wooden kick wheel, filling ware-boards with practice mugs, bowls, pitchers and jars. We were all on the cusp of adult life, and all earnestly pursuing the dream of life as a studio potter. We would live somewhere beautiful and make our easy livings playing with clay. We got the message and we embraced it: follow your bliss.” Ramah Commanday
During this period, I made pilgrimages to the studios of legends-in-their-own-time master potters Bernard Leach in Cornwall, England, and Bauhaus potter Marguerite Wildenhain, on the Russian River in Guerneville, California.
In 1978, I opened shop as an independent studio potter, at Bluebird Creek Pottery in Santa Cruz, California. I followed my bliss: falling into a routine of throwing pots on the wheel in my backyard studio by the beach in the mornings, swimming in the ocean in the afternoons, and writing poetry and making music with friends in the evenings. My porcelain, carved celadon, and stoneware work were sold by Gumps of San Francisco, and by fine arts galleries in Santa Cruz, Monterey, and Murphys, California. My work resides in private collections in the United States, Japan, and Europe.
copper red vase by Mary Flodin
I have participated in a number of community arts projects, including the Lifeyard Peace Sculpture Project on the San Lorenzo River in Santa Cruz in the 1980’s. While participating in this project,I me clay sculptor Coeleen Kiebert.
In 1982, Coeleen introduced me to artist and medical scientist Minna Hertel, whose parents owned the historic Capitola Hotel. Minna invited Coeleen and I to take part in a Kirlian photography project, pictorially documenting the energy fields of potters working with clay.
The project resulted in a stunning and astounding show in Capitola, California, revealing the hidden auras of humans and the materials they contact, which I documented in an essay, published in the February, 1983 issue of Ceramics Monthly Magazine. This introduction to Kirlian photography led me to begin my exploration into the physics, metaphysics, and healing potential of clay and biotic energy fields.
At this time, Bluebird Creek Pottery produces functional kitchenware, vases, and lamps, as well as fountains, flower pots, and small votive sculptures for the garden, ritual and ceremonial pieces for life events such as weddings, births, and death; and whatever other forms the creative earth-potter synergy expresses and manifests in the moment. The potter views her work with clay as a spiritual and healing act of communion and joy — liberating, soothing, balancing, centering, elevating and purifying body, mind, and creative spirit.
I’ve been taught by and brushed shoulders with some of the greatest potters of my generation. But, as Al Johnsen said in Thiermann’s film, CLAY-Living with the Process, I doubt that I’m going to be remembered in the history of ceramics, which has been going on for about 300,000 years —as long as homo sapiens first shaped river clay into a figurine. However, I feel satisfied to have been a part of that process, to connect in the potter’s way with our living Earth’s elements— earth air fire water and spirit, and to share the tradition with others, in the hope that it will be passed on for many generations of humans to come.
The project resulted in a stunning and astounding show in Capitola, California, revealing the hidden auras of humans and the materials they contact, which I documented in an essay, published in the February, 1983 issue of Ceramics Monthly Magazine. This introduction to Kirlian photography led me to begin my exploration into the physics, metaphysics, and healing potential of clay and biotic energy fields.