Although trained as a painter I have been working in clay for over 35 years. I have always thrown on the potter’s wheel. In grade school there was an art shack with a treadle wheel.
Today I throw thin porcelain cups and bowls. I love the fluidity of porcelain. The look of wet clay, a thin just thrown cup or bowl is still very alive. I want to retain this feeling through the glaze and the firing. Weight and balance are what seem to hold it steady.
Often I draw or paint an image into my work. I use the curves and hollows of a bowl. I also work on flat slabs and use metal oxides and earth minerals as a painter might. Clay is the canvas.
I want to convey stories and images that are important to me. Our Columbia River family property, in the family over 100 years, now has a conservation easement and protects the "endangered" chum salmon and their spawning site below our riverbank where an underground spring emerges. I have studied these fish and their plight, have made drawings of them as they circled and thrashed in the water making their redds, and have tried to draw these salmon into clay panels and in bowls.
Species of native cattle and horses, vacche and cavalli Maremmano, have become important to me during my visits to Italy. These animals live and pasture around the ancient Etruscan and Roman site of Vulci, in the ravines and on the vast meadows overlooking the Flora river. They forage among thistles, oaks and brambles, finnochio and wild mint. I follow them as they move, and make drawings in ink or oil pastel. I receive a pure kind of pleasure being in their presence. Their unspoken language with one another puts the world in order for me and I return refreshed in my spirit. In my studio I work to bring these animals alive again by putting lines and images into my pottery.
Flat-sided teapot and vessel construction interest me. The geometry of shape; the triangle, the square, are my building blocks. Unplanned broken bits and pieces become details and edges, create depth and shadow. While traveling in Italy I have been attracted to these ancient sites, ruins, the stone shapes, the broken edges left by the fallen away parts.
More recently I have started using more color in my glazes, I think because I am inspired by the color and light I see in Italy. It is reflected against the walls, the layering of hills in the distance, the clouds and the sky. I want to discover these colors for my work.
Mardi Wood
Bolinas, CA
August, 2009