Twelve years ago

VIDEO

Twelve years ago, following decades as a professional potter studying the arcane techniques and methodologies of our near extinct alchemy, I walked into the studio of Clayton Amemiya and saw a vessel the likes of which I'd never seen before. The object seemed to float in its own private space on the table. It wasn't unstable, but well grounded. It was neither symmetrical, nor truly asymmetrical, neither really centered in the bilateral way potters understand products of the wheel, nor perceptibly lop-sided. The glaze was similarly mystical. It was sophisticated, yet raw and primitive. There was a sense of great purpose to the vessel, belied by an extraordinary informality. The impression of accident encapsulated in the vessel wasn't the sort of purposeful calamity we perceive in a circus clown's precarious tightrope walk – it was balanced, but seemed an object still mobile in space and time.

When I asked the potter how this vessel was crafted, he explained to me that the hollow form was essentially wheel thrown, manipulated by hand, then offered to his unique kiln – the anagama. This kiln wasn't simply for hardening and glazing ware as most modern kilns are, the anagama was the hand which completed the form of the vessel. Bowls, vases and platters were meticulously stacked into the single chamber, hill-side kiln. Firey gases would flow across the prepared ware, appropriating the potter's markings to their own device. The artist becomes a lens through which the greater forces of human nature, historic culture, and the nature of matter itself is focused into singularities. Understanding little, I left, but returned again and again for over a decade to observe the making of ware through this unique process.

In the studio a new series begins. On the potter's wheel, vessels are created by harnessing centrifugal force, coaxing clay into form. For a moment the material spins between displacing fingers, determining a still point in space. Pliable clay conforms, rotating away, then returning in circuit to its point of origin, forming an orbit. As the potter's hands rise, the motion translates circle into spiral upon the plastic medium, approximating concentric circles which define volume. Near magically, a vessel appears upon the wheel.

With the advent of the electric wheel, the potter's hand has tended to move more slowly while clay spins faster and faster, allowing the created spiral to offer an illusion of near perfect symmetry. But on the kick wheel, Clayton's hands move quickly, while his wheel moves slowly, exaggerating spirals which precipitate a moment of near irreversible asymmetry. Then he releases the clay and begins again. A second and third spiral capture the emerging form in a net of influencing forces giving rise to a unique improvisation, an object of asymmetric balance. He lifts the resultant memory of process easily off the wheel, places it upon the waiting shelf, and moves on to the next.

Over the millennia during which people have fired clay into pottery, the glassy residue which once accidentally collected upon the surface of wood fired ware has been co-opted into glaze. Through generations of experiment, formulations of glass-like powder have been artfully applied to hardened clay vessels, simultaneously ornamenting them, and rendering them impervious to liquid. Today, most kilns are fueled by gas or electricity, and fuse glaze onto vessel in a process lasting just a few hours. The anagama kiln however, fires for four days and nights without stop, using only highly specific woods combusted continuously to create sustained heat. The accumulation of ash upon the wares comprises the body of glaze.

As the anagama is loaded, vessels are perched upon sea shells impregnated with clay to balance and separate the pieces. At the front of the kiln, the fire is lit. Heat, smoke and ash are drawn up the sloping chamber into a tall chimney elevated by the hillside. Fingers of flame and ash reach through the stack of wares for a hundred hours. The memory of the path of fire through bowls, within cups and under platters, accumulates a residue of molten ash. The tilt of vessel, and the secret path of gas around solid, leaves a footprint that might be read by the knowing eye, emoting the passage of geological time upon the fossilized artifacts of an artist's hand.

A week later, the cooling vessels are removed from the kiln, and carefully separated. Without the prosthetic clay filled shells between them, the ware would stick together in the saturated bath of vitreous ash. However, with a small nudge, calcium falls away allowing an uneasy separation of the married inhabitants of the kiln's interior. Imprints of shell on fluxed clay brand the works. Residues of salt from the seashells have corroded variegated halos around their released fingerprints.

The shadow of one vessel upon another within the kiln dissembles a story of time, place and process. A delicate bowl suspended by three points from the lip, recalls the stresses of fire, triangulating the round form once determined upon the potter's wheel.

Sculpted bottles, surfaces etched to catch passing ash, pool fluid residue which pours down tilted faces, in frozen recollection of gravity's promise.

Long slender vases originally thrown on the wheel, elongated and squared off in the hand, recall their spiral creation under duress of fire, uncoiling into a lyrical compromise between nature and nurture. Each vessel has become an extraordinary document – mnemonic of hand and fire. Within the anagama, structural elements and chemical bonds are loosened by extreme heat, allowing the potter's material to recall the hand of nature which once forged clay from cooling earth, the hand of the artist which altered that plastic material to become a vessel, and the path of fire which allowed those memories to rise in this extraordinary ballet of motion, form and time.

Pottery is an anachronistic field in our culture today, perceived ambiguously as either art or craft. Its medium, clay, is the earth in which we plant our crops, the material we harden to brick our homes and tile our kitchens. We form clay to fetish, sculpt it to graven image, and spin it upon a wheel to craft the plates, bowls and cups from which we consume our food. While traditionally handmade wares emerged from the hands of local craftsmen, in any Wal-Mart we can pick up an anonymous cup or plate fashioned in a factory, perhaps machine made, untouched by human hands. Yet in the collections of connoisseurs, ceramic vessels of intransient beauty are prized as high art. The perceptual transition from product to art is neither simply from primitive to sophisticated, nor from functional to aesthetic. It's a subtle dance whose imprint is rooted in our thirty thousand year relationship with earth, fire and vessel.

Clayton Amemiya is an anagama potter trained in Okinawa, residing in Hilo, Hawaii who makes functional ware based on East Asian models, as well as sculptural objects inspired by the Big Island environment. He studied with master potter, Seisho Kuniyoshi (1943-2000) of Okinawa in the mid 1970's, and has fired in an anagama for the past 25 years. He has exhibited in the U.S. Japan and China, and his works are included in public and private collections in the U.S., East Asia and Europe.

photographs by Franco Salmoiraghi