Ceremonial Vessels

My BFA is in Ceramics and after spending 30 years working as an illustrator, art teacher, graphics designer, data librarian, secretary, I finally got back to being a potter. My little studio in the woods beside our home in Woodville, didn't really have the equipment to do the kind of ceramics I had learned about in college, high fired glazes on simple Bonard Leach style pots, so I decided to go in a different direction and study very primitive forms and designs and produce pottery that was created using the most primitive methods I could.

Looking back at the Jomon period of Japanese potters, 8 thousand years ago, I found a unique style of forming and finishing that appealed to me. Forms that were so non-functional that they couldn't possibly be used for anything but ceremonial purposes. These were pots just to look at, contemplate and yet serve as metaphor for some high idea.

Based on what I considered some high ideas, Carl Jung's "Man and His Symbol", very 1960's, I created a personal vocabulary of forms and surfaces on some very Jomon looking vessels.

I'm not the first potter to do this, but it gave me a start in getting back to using clay. Because I'm not manufacturing dishes, cups and vases, these pots won't even hold water for very long, I call them ceremonial vessels.