Although trained as a painter, I work with clay. I throw thin porcelain cups and bowls...often I draw into them... I like to work with clay slabs....I use ceramic pencil and crayon, metal oxide, engobe, my hands and wooden and needle tools...Clay is my canvas...
I want to have mastery over my material, the clay...yet at the same time let it speak for itself...let it speak to me! I want its own innate qualities to come forth in their own way and guide me.
Oxides dripping, colors shadowing under earlier colors, glaze cascading down walls.... The act of throwing, the soft porcelain rising between my fingers, thin and wavering walls...fluid...knowing the moment to stop.
I like to make the most simple of forms....touchable and elegant...and ‘play’ with constructed shapes.
My cow and horse drawings are gestural responses to the moving animal...drawing...putting marks onto paper as the animal moves around. I do not intend a literal description, but rather a sense of it as it affects me on an emotional and visceral level.
These lines, gestures, and forms become part of the pots I make...drawn into the clay itself...becoming the connection between myself, the pot, the drawing, and the animal.
To tell a story through an animal...to use its story as part of an ancient narrative...while at the same time bringing to mind today's plight of our “engineered” cattle, their disguised flesh wrapped in plastic at our supermarket meat counters...I want to reveal ancient truths...visual stories of the ancient auroch of prehistoric caves, of the sacred and revered cow of pagan myth, the giver of milk and nourishment to man, of the Sumerian epic story of Gilgamesh whose mother was ‘Lady Wild Cow’...of the bull with great horns over which ancient Crete athletes vaulted and summersaulted...of the Maremma cattle still carrying the genes of prehistoric cattle and still revered by Italians as ‘tradizione’...of the poem, “Il Bove”, by Nobel prize honored poet, Carducci,..still studied by Italian school children...of the imagery of long horned cattle pulling the fine carts of Etruscans and Romans depicted on their ceramic forms... and later pulling the farmer’s plough...before tractors...I draw these animals who still forage in their native environment in the Maremma country of Italy.
Mardi Wood
February 2013