Macrocosmically speaking, I think of the breadth of time as the plural-present simultaneity of exactly coincident events and states both known and unknown. This quality of breadth, when multiplied by the infinite continuum of sequential instances both past and future, can be described as being the scope of time. This mind-boggling, ever expanding and vast model is made meaningful only as we notice and take advantage of time’s experientially perceptible divisions relevant to our own lives, environment, activities and circumstances.

For example, as living beings having physical bodies, we persevere in the world by cyclical actions: the beat of our hearts, breathing, sleeping, drinking fluids, eating food, sleeping, sex. These repeating phenomena performed in and by our bodies mirror the periodic buzz of the vibrating environment in which our bodies exist. The sun's rise and set correspond to our sleep patterns. Our breathing is like the washing of waves on the beach. Menstruation aligns with the wax and wane of the moon. When the temperature is right, our hearts may beat in unison with a cricket's chirping. We are an integral part of a nature that is in constant oscillation. Events pulsing and flowing in the physical world weave and simultaneously unravel an unfathomably rich tapestry of inextricably interrelated ordered and entropic systems. Human consciousness exists in and of these overarching schemes.

Yet, the human experience is far greater than being a simple case of matter and energy in motion. Embodied minds transcend the constraints of mere physicality and operate in a world of ideas. Ideation is most often a gradual, methodical process, the result of trial and error, successive preparatory efforts, recursive evaluations, and old fashioned hard work. Rarer, ideas may arrive in a blinding flash of insight. Whatever their origins, the signified may become symbolized graphically or shared via an expressive idiom. Art is one such strategy that meshes the material world with the realm of concepts, permitting the viewer refreshed insights into the human condition. The systematic approach for developing sound ideas is applicable when making art while recognizing valuable serendipity when it appears. The art practitioner may choose from many timely ways of working. Prolonged activity, building up successive layers or surfaces, produces aesthetic density. Sequentially carving away or erasing likewise contributes to formal expression just as erosion creates a canyon.

The medium of clay (literally landscape) and the art practice of ceramics (earth constituents selectively manipulated then transformed in trials by fire from the ordinary to the extraordinary for varied aesthetic reasons) occurs at the broad intersection of enduring natural and comparatively recent cultural history. One class of such created objects, meaningful by their time tested association with human survival, is called pottery.

The pots I make are sculptural ewers, that is, pouring vessels. Implied uses inherent in the vessel archetype and the interplay of positive and negative sculptural spaces inform my exploration of behavioral reciprocity with my ewers: filling and emptying, giving and receiving, containing and dispensing, communication and understanding, presence and absence, male and female, touching and being touched, seeing and being seen, imposing and deferring, creation and destruction. My intention is to make innovative, vigorous, potent objects, identifiably 21st Century American and, by configuration, more or less stereotypically “male” associated with behavioral attributes of that gender. I trust that the thoughtful observer will detect a certain irony in the work, more than a touch of humor, a resonance with the body, and those conduct traits on a continuum of good to bad that the so embodied exhibit.

As living beings having physical bodies, we persevere in the world by cyclical actions: the beat of our hearts, breathing, sleeping, drinking fluids, eating food, sleeping, sex. These repeating phenomena performed in and by our bodies mirror the periodic buzz of the vibrating environment in which our bodies exist. The sun's rise and set correspond to our sleep patterns. Our breathing is like the washing of waves on the beach. Menstruation aligns with the wax and wane of the moon. When the temperature is right, our hearts may beat in unison with a cricket's chirping. We are an integral part of a nature that is in constant oscillation. Events pulsing and flowing in the physical world weave and simultaneously unravel an unfathomably rich tapestry of inextricably interrelated ordered and entropic systems. Human consciousness exists in and of these overarching schemes.

Yet, the human experience is far greater than being a simple case of matter and energy in motion. Embodied minds transcend the constraints of mere physicality and operate in a world of ideas. These ideas may become symbolized graphically or signified via an expressive idiom. Art is one such strategy that meshes the material world with the realm of concepts, permitting the viewer refreshed insights into the human condition. The medium of clay (literally landscape) and the art practice of ceramics (earth constituents selectively built up then transformed in trials by fire from the ordinary to the extraordinary for varied aesthetic reasons) occurs at the broad intersection of natural and cultural history. One class of such created objects, meaningful by their time tested association with human survival, is called pottery.

The pots I make are sculptural ewers, that is, pouring vessels. Implied uses inherent in the vessel archetype and the interplay of positive and negative sculptural spaces inform my exploration of behavioral reciprocity with my ewers: filling and emptying, giving and receiving, containing and dispensing, communication and understanding, presence and absence, male and female, touching and being touched, seeing and being seen, imposing and deferring, creation and destruction. My intention is to make vigorous, potent forms, identifiably 21st Century American and, by configuration, more or less stereotypically “male” associated with behavioral attributes of that gender. I trust that the thoughtful observer will detect a certain irony in the work, more than a touch of humor, a resonance with the body, and those conduct traits on a continuum of good to bad that the so embodied exhibit.

Being an artist is not merely performing a set of technical practices but is more plainly a way of being, relying on filtered sensations of an essentially aesthetic nature, as a way of literally making ones way in the world. Pottery is a unique category of aesthetic objects which marry the optical and tactile in an encounter of intimate space and personal proximity, charged by the relationships of the scale and grasp of the human body. Like our temporal (corporeal) bodies, a pot is created, contains in its volume during its lifetime, and will eventually enter into broken non-being by abrupt accident or the passage of sufficient time. Concern with the sculptural, formal articulation of the human body in the historical context of pottery as a pragmatic theater for nourishing that body, and the attendant social structures that have evolved around such use are the over-arching concepts that inform my work as a potter and artist. This interfusion is achieved by an aesthetic hierarchical formal composition of the features of the pot (i.e. lip, foot, waist, neck, belly, etc.) which serve to express each pot’s potentials for promoting, reflecting, or memorializing the body’s well being.

The sustained body participating in a qualitative variety of possible social transactions is, therefore, an inexhaustible source of ideas for making pottery objects. This is because the realm of formal expressive possibilities, if any are to be postulated in a work of art, require a continual reworking to adequately attempt to address the unrealized possibilities of a subject. With each new work, my desire is sharpened to create more contingent pot objects as a willing, full participant in a meaningful, authentic transcendent process of ongoing expressive anticipation.

The pots exhibited are ewers (pouring vessels) which permit giving and receiving, containing then dispensing, and therefore suggest related social transactions as additional dynamic meanings. Gender is referenced via these notions of performance as as well as the display of unmistakable anatomical analogies of projecting spouts and pregnant swelling volumes. Surface texture and color, as would cosmetic adornments, uniforms or costumes, provoke meaningful associations within the viewer. Titles of works can interject irony, seasoning the viewer’s experience of these ceramic surrogates for specific aspects of the general human condition. As aesthetic means for wish fulfillment may these pots serve to exorcize the spurious in our behavior while making the viewer aware of the way pottery can resonate with our own embodiment and enhance perceptions in the world of being.

Finally, and what I consider least important about my work, I have been asked to provide some technical notes on my methods. These pots are hand built of luted together multiple clay pieces. These parts can be press-molded, thrown on the potter’s wheel, coiled, soft slab constructed, draped over patterns or otherwise manipulated into usable shapes. When dry, the assembled pots are then bisque fired in one of my electric kilns or in my larger outdoor updraft gas kiln.

If the pot survives the bisque fire (and some do not, collapsing or slumping under their own weight in the heat if inadequately “engineered” or perhaps succumbing to the effects of gravity if the balance is not worked out sufficiently) then I begin an open-ended sequence of applying surfaces of underglazes, slips and glazes. I glaze fire the pot, evaluate what has or hasn’t been achieved, layer on more slips or glazes and re-fire over and over until I am satisfied with the color and texture (analogous to the way a painter builds up the surface of a painting.) All that or the cumulative effects of thermal fatigue make the pot cave-in. I work at earthenware temperatures (low-fire) in oxidization or very light reduction for the most part, although I will sometimes bisque at stoneware temperatures (higher-fire) and glaze fire in a descending order of cooler and cooler low-fire layers. Making these pots is, therefore, an act of faith before it is one of skill, a heuristic process rather than an algorithm, and a significant part is recognition of serendipity when it appears in the midst of concerted intentionality.

Paul F. Morris
January 7, 2006
Fort Collins, CO