Unlike so many potters, my first experiences with clay were not happy ones.

Unlike so many potters, my first experiences with clay were not happy ones.  I've often read of the almost epiphanous and life-altering moment when a potter first encounters the clay medium.  I had that experience, but it was when I first walked into the Printmaking studio of the University where I was working for a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree.  The smell of the chemicals and the warm look of a freshly inked copper plate took my breath away.  I never wanted to leave.  I only later took a pottery class as an elective and as a curiosity.  My wide-eyed roommate was taking pottery classes, and was creating wonderful full-blown pots finished in subtle shades of lilac and softest blue, almost from the first moment she sat at the wheel.  How hard could it be?  Very hard, I was to find out.  I spent hours and hours at that wheel until the skin was scraped from the sides of my hands and they were bloody only to end up with a brown lumpy sort of"bowl something"... or something.  It didn't help that our teacher's critiques consisted of his holding up one of our pots, saying it was bad, and then opening his fingers to let it drop to the floor where it shattered back to it's original raw clay state.  I decided that I was not a potter, and dropped the class.  The best compliment that I was probably ever given was by that exacting taskmaster teacher when he found out that I was leaving the class.  "It's too bad that you're dropping out," he remarked, "I think you might possibly have a good sense of form.....but, oh well."  He shrugged and walked away.  I left with a slight sense of regret, but went happily back to what I considered home - the studio where I could draw and make lithographs and etchings. 

It was only years later, while living in France that I could revisit the possibilities of clay.  Somewhere along the way I came to realize the limitations for me of working in two-dimensions.  I needed to be making something that took up space.  I seemed to need the structure of the vessel for it's possibilities of form, the shape of space that it could envelope and the outside blank expanse for surface decoration.  There was also the as-yet undefined connection I began to feel with those before me who also made fine things with their hands, probably stemming from growing up around hardworking farm women whose only outlet for their abundant creativity were the domestic arts, and the excitement they displayed when they proudly showed each other their fine embroidery, crochet, needlework and quilts. 

So it was that I began my long-postponed and difficult journey with clay.