Everything is cracking
Smashing Stories in the Ceramics Exhibition
(A reminder that I record all my Substacks. You can listen to them by pressing play above if you don’t feel like reading.)
Last Friday night I was stoked to facilitate a writing workshop at Maitland Regional Art Gallery. The event was held in the Mud to Masterpiece Ceramics Exhibition, and we called it “Smashing Stories.”
My main responsibility that night was leading the workshop and serving the wine, but towards the end I was luckily able to jot down a few words myself.
The prompt was to write about Australian Potter Gerry Wedd’s impressive and enormous Wave Urn, or hypnotizing Wave film, displayed also on an enormous, custom-built screen. But the writers could take inspiration from any piece in the exhibition. Gerry reminded me of the John Keats poem Ode On A Grecian Urn, which I read aloud before we found a place amongst the pots to write our pieces.
I wasn’t sure where the muse would take me in the brief moment I had to think about pottery and poetry, but lately, as you may well know, the monks walking for peace are always close to the surface of my brain, no matter what I’m doing.
So monks and pottery it is. Here is the poem I just finished tonight… Or, at least, I think it’s finished.
(If you have poems about clay or pots or monks or peace, I’d love to hear them, please.)
Monks and Mud
I’m thinking about peace and earth and the things that we hold and the things that hold us and how art galleries show mud through the hands of masters, something so different to wet feet in puddles…
We speak of half-full glasses yet the world runs on empty. But somehow peaceful platitudes from barefoot men on a backcountry road somewhere in North Carolina fill my cup, even though the universe feels like ashes lately, like the solar system spins within an unreliable urn, like everything is cracking.
Pottery offers peace, offers a vessel to contain the leaky, lonely, less desirable parts of ourselves. Ceramics, in their delicacy, show me serenity is fragile.
Monks walk for peace along dirty streets. Potters throw clay, burn earth.
Grounding rituals and touching movements.
Despite violence and fire, men walk and hands make.
I love your poem! I'm going to print it out and hang onto it!
I love your poem Alex!