Unplanned Forms

Today’s video looks at Hawaiian-born ceramist Toshiko Takaezu. Her work is simultaneously intimate and monumental, mostly employing hand-built methods of vessel making:

In the film, she says, “You make a piece that you don’t have planned…and then when you see it, something happens, and it looks as though you have to go into another direction because this thing happened.” 
The perl resides in being awake to see what the form awakens to.

In a lump of clay we believe we are shaping it, when in fact, it is shaping us.

Auguste Elder

Be alert to those emerging narratives swelling from the clay, and your intersection with it.

I was also surprised to see my college poetry professor Stephen Berg in this film. He lends beautiful insights into the relationship between timelessness and forms.