This Pot is here, and I am the Potter who was.
George Orh. The Mad Potter of Biloxi
This line of his, impressed upon the walls of the museum, says it all for me. How true, and how fitting that a clay vessel should stand for where and who we were. I have yet to make the pilgrimage to Bolixi to visit his museum, which is shared with the collection of artist, Georgia O’Keefe…two iconoclasts under one Frank Gehry warped roof: https://www.georgeohr.org/
The self-professed “Mad Potter of Biloxi,” George Ohr’s work and life are an inseparable amalgam of person, place, time, and endeavor. He is considered by most to be America’s first studio potter, and was responsible for every phase of his works’ ontogenesis: digging and processing of the clay, production of pieces, glazing, firing, and marketing. His forms are most often noted for their torqued, feather-light bodies, flamboyant handles, and experimental glazes. Working primarily during the Victorian era, his work was a virtual temporal displacement, and could have easily been made in the 1950s or 60s…100 years ahead of its time. As such, he was largely an anomaly, and not quite appreciated in his lifetime, though he was by all means a prolific and successful artisan.
There is also something quite mythic about how Ohr metamorphized from the somewhat conventional to the experimental via his studio accidentally burning down: a phoenix of sorts.
The very notion of fire transforming both the pots and the potter is not something that is lost on this author, and is a theme I certainly return to again and again as we work together: how the clay shapes us as much, if not more than we shape it.
If you take anything from Ohr’s praxis, let this be close to the core: play, experimentation, embracing the unplanned, and obsession are powerful agents for deep learning.