Storytelling pots →

Looking at the photographs of the Richard Batterham exhibition recently ended at Contemporary Applied Arts and hearing about it, what strikes me is the vision of the work and the space he creates in it for continuing stories.  There are bowls made in 1962 close by the same bowl made fifty years later.  The similarities and profound differences are the measure of a story still being told.  And that is not the only story, I have a lidded jar of his that I keep coffee in.  It is beautiful, very useful and will outlive me.  It has Satish Kumar's BUD within it - beautiful, useful and durable.  It holds my coffee and the story of my relationship with it, really well.  

Made objects have their own story, of the conceiving in the maker's mind, the meeting of intention and action when the object is made, thrown, turned, glazed and fired, and the object that reveals itself when the kiln is opened.  The predictability of the process in no way diminishes tension and the pleasure (or not) of that moment.  Any object has a story, its own and the tale we invest it with when we pick it up.  A pebble on a beach, a book of matches, a railway ticket.  

Batterham's retrospective was made of pieces he had held back, the ones he kept because they spoke to him.  Maybe there were pieces he didn't put up for sale because to start with he wanted time to discover how he felt about it.  There is an intimacy in the relationship with what you make.  Going to friend's house to see a piece of my work in their washing up rack is a huge pleasure, and I remember the piece and sometimes its story.  My past work is clumsy and awkward, but even so reminds me that I was imagining this object at that moment.  For me it holds a particular story.  For my friend it holds another.  And stories are our engagement with each other and ourselves, our intimacy.

Recently I have been putting together a showreel of work that I have done .  Its purpose is to show potential employers what I can do, it's an opportunity to showboat.  Each piece has a story of how and why it turned out the way it did, for you watching, they are glimpses of stories that maybe you have seen, or are intrigued by (or not).  But they are not frozen for either of us, both in terms of how I feel towards them now, or in how you look at the reel as a single piece.  For me also it's creating an object which I hope will affect the future;  I need to work, to carry on with that work.  As I work on it so it becomes more rounded, more skilled, I get better at manipulating the editing app.  There are lots of technical hold ups and reversals, each time I get sent back by error or lack of skill, something is revealed.  

And in the garden of the pottery a kiln is finally taking shape that has gone through a similar process of reversal and over thinking.  Both the showreel and the kiln are means towards an end, and both have taken on a story of intention and imagination.  What will the story be this time next year? Richer and surprising.

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For Larry : Other words for teaching...

Teaching.

Other ways to look at how that word works. Sharing experience, handing on a practice, a process.  The making of anything demands a discipline & a practice.  Transforming imagination into action, making the imagined exist.  Creating a place where the transformation is possible, without needing to know exactly what the outcome will be.

Taking a photo, making a pot.  Making an episode of Casualty.  Process, equipment & technicality need to be at the service of the idea.  How to liberate thinking, to use the kit to make the thing.  Not allowing the stuff dictate the outcome.

Liberation, vision & voice.  Being here & being seen.

Speaking with Amy today, discussing teaching, she described how she feels it works for her. And it's not performing to please the students (children for her).  It's about working together, and discovering the events together that allow them enjoy it.  Collaborating towards laughter.  

Learning happens in an environment where responsibilities are discovered and shared.  A teacher becomes someone who frees up the material.  Knowledge and experience creating an environment where thinking is possible, where its consequences are unknown and discoverable.  The experience and trust that I need to create that place, communicates itself to those people I am working with.

Coach / coaching / coached : coach potato

Collaboration : consorting with the enemy or creating a place to grow : planting seeds, gardening,

Sowing the whirlwind / reaping the storm

Searching for grains of truth.  Investigation / enquiry.  

Listening

Apples - autumn arriving

Autumn.  Here already.  Boxes of apples, damson bloom, evenings stretch out dark for so much longer.  The equinox passed,  more night than day until... the next equinox.  Colours change, shift, fall, carpet.  Seeing through trees happens more often.  Silhouettes at evening are sparser, harsher dark shaped branches, inner structures reveal after so many months hidden.  Transition to the fire colours.  The way the light recedes and leaves is different.  Brief moments of pale stubble fields radiating upwards, before shadows gather and flatten everything.  Rook caw and owl screech.  Even a fox screaming on Addleymoor adds darkness and erotic charge to the unrolling dark.

Retreating inside, there is more time to... read, write blogs, watch dvd's, catch up with... sleep.  The dark outside is pushing the windows.  Underwater darkness.  I love this time of year.  There's no trouble finding an excuse to light a fire.  The fields and common outside quietly continue to be full of hidden exuberance.  

The car is full of apples.  In the cool of morning it will smell like the cellar of my grandma's greenhouse, softly damp with the memory of gently stored apples at any time of year.  Leaving the topmost ones glowing in the dying sun.  Can't reach them anyway, and leave some for the birds.

So, autumn has come.  Welcome

Journeyman director

Waiting as a productive and active approach to creativity.

In an August garden - the seedheads of May flowerings lean and shake their contents beneath late summer show.  The purpose of nectar and pollen gatherers is repeated and unstoppable work.  The weather will stay warm and mild, but days are already significantly shorter than a month ago.  There is less daylight to work with.  Rippening fruit and falling yellow birch leaves, it never stops changing, there is never a moment identical to its predecessor.  Not just in a garden, in every aspect of living there is change.  Repetition makes it most obvious.  

Being addicted to individuality, to newness and to being 'unique', is the tiger trap I willingly dig and blithely tumble into.  To be a fully rounded, interesting and creative director I have to know that I am unique, different from any other.  I have to believe that when I get hired, it is my ability to see and portray a story my way, that keeps me employed and re-employed.  In the background my quarter of a century of 'previous' is a weight to be ignored, and piece of baggage to be left in the apartment.  I trade on longevity only as a contrast to reveal how I am still light on my feet, inventive and technically savvy.

But when it comes to actually directing, actually deciding the content and choreography of a sequence, I rely totally on my gut.  I rely upon a confidence that I know how to do the work, and within that confidence lies the opportunity for innovation.  I have done this enough to allow the unexpected and new to happen and thrive within my 'garden'.  

And waiting ?  Most trades and crafts have their apprenticeship benchmarks, and most seem to be 10,000 hours or repetitions.  Potters are supposed to make 10,000 pots before they can call themselves a potter.  Making or surviving for ten thousand of anything requires tenacity.  The ten thousand will reflect peaks and troughs of achievement and misery, and there will also be, implicit in the score, a recognition of change and its ever present possibility.  And recognising the importance of turning up.  Simply the act of going to work, or being present, and waiting.  Waiting for your hands to learn the strength and suppleness, learning how to think through a lens not about it, learning how to trust your judgement that what you have is the thing you want.

When operating a movie camera waiting creates balance and narrative tension.  Hurrying the frame to make the shot, anticipating the arrival in the frame of a new element or character, prevents the action from engaging your attention.  The audience become aware of a chivvying voice pushing and tugging at them, the space for them to wonder and to investigate is diminished.  If the choreography works, and the camera is in 'the right place' then all the operator has to do is to wait for the shot to fall into the frame. Or, the frame becomes capable of its own inquisitiveness, wondering what will happen next, but not knowing.  If there is suddenly the empty space behind a character's head, the frying pan comes as no shock.  But the final frame of Carrie's headstone carries no indication of what is about to happen. (No spoilers here, even thirty years on) Watching that moment from the back row of the Brixton Ritzy was a great lesson.  It was as though the cinema had flown into an airpocket, the whole audience rose into the air as one.

Waiting is not passive either.  Waiting is very active.  In Chinese wu wei 吳衛 (woo way) is the practice of 'doing' nothing.  It is about creating a place where change can happen and be recognised.  In some ways it fits the idea of the muse striking.  The waiting creates the space for change.  The waiting has created the possibility, the attention of waiting, the wide eyed focus.  It is a very personal practice, a meditation.  

Musical practice does it.  Scales practiced every day, pieces played over and over, searching for the structure and form within the music.  T'ai Qi, for me, has the similar possibility, and revelation within it.  Repeated practice of a form reveals and continues to reveal new meaning and relevance.  And sometimes is bone numbingly dull and uneventful.

To have repetition in multiple places makes it easier to see the connections within the everyday.  For me t'ai qi to pottery, the deeper understanding of a bowl or a movement through repeating their expression, has made both practices more engaging.  And both of them have influenced how I feel about directing, and how I direct.  This is what I chose to do with my career, this job was also meant to be the culmination of my expression of myself.  It was my art for the world to see.  And a lot of the time I found myself extremely lonely and unhappy, and making stuff I thought banal and dull.  I kept turning up. I am a determined person, but it wasn't all healthy. The spur of responsibility and mortgages, and the possibility of looking a pillock, held me to it, and sometimes only keeping it together out of an inability to recognise what was intolerable, and by distracting myself with infidelity and the bonkers scrambling for the next job.  There were many opportunities wasted, and too much pain inflicted on people I should have cared for better.

Now ? Well now I discover that I truly enjoy directing.  I have always enjoyed making anything, and learning anything, but the making of Casualty or Holby or Lewis, or anything else, I take a huge pleasure in.  Older, I get more tired, and can find myself dazed with the sheer physical requirements, but I get great pleasure from practicing my craft; and that I didn't get before.  The making of thousands of pots, and the repetition of t'ai qi, maybe just the repetition of days, have helped release a joy in my work.  I am lucky, it was a gamble, but turning up has been my way along.