During the height of the pandemic, I taught a ceramic history class over Zoom. No field trips to museums, no visits to artists’ studios, just lectures with images… week after week. Trying to make up for all that students were missing in this single-track version of education, I tried to give them more, covering cultures and traditions from every continent (nearly), from the Neolithic to Now. The whole thing ended up being as educational for me as it was for them: a tidal wave of shapes, colors and textures crashing over me, leaving behind many beautiful ghosts.

A month after the class ended in December 2020, I began making drawings. Each of the strangely-animated forms I conjured up incorporated elements from the cultures I’d talked about, in a sort of exquisite corpse/ mashup of shapes and purposes. Sung Dynasty and Meso-American. Art Deco and Caddoan (one of the native cultures of the North America). Dutch and Moche. After a few weeks, it occurred to me that I could make some of these inventions out of clay. Many years have gone by since my apprenticeship to a sociopathic potter in Japan and the decade of ceramic practice that followed, during which I refined my skills with that material. But, well, it really is like riding a bicycle. Your body never forgets what it knows.

I confess to taking pleasure in other people being able (or not) to identify the source of a shape, a handle or a foot. In the end, though, these are neither old nor new; practical nor magical, but vessels for the imagination.