Show Statement
I’m a Latin teacher by day and a potter by night. So I couldn’t help thinking of the Roman god Janus when I learned that my next show would be in January.
As the deity of doors and thresholds and beginnings, Janus is a figure of the in-between. It was a good image for 2020. Last year’s global uncertainty was mirrored in the transitions of many of my friends. Focusing on this liminal god allowed Leah and me to explore their stories in clay and ink.
Janus also proved to be an image open to hope. He was usually depicted with two faces: an old face looking toward the past and a young face turned to the future. To me, the pairing suggests wisdom and wonder—another idea that led me back into the company of people I love. The wall of plates plays with their particular incarnation of these two postures.
The Faces of Love
The Faces of Love
This series began in a basement AirBnB with two chairs, three friends, and a feast of cheese and chutney and crackers and tea. Leah was about to come under her school’s COVID travel ban. Hannah had been engaged for two days. In borrowed space and borrowed time we savored our friendship, trying with Hannah to picture the unknown country of marriage.
2020 has been a year like that. My friends are moving, marrying, expecting children or raising them. They’re not under any illusions about the kindness or safety of this world. But they’re hopeful. Stepping over thresholds, entering uncertain spaces and certain risks, they’re leaning into the fidelities and friendships that make them who they are. There’s an elusive brightness in the in-between: love, like Janus, is a god with many faces.
~ Hannah ~
It’s hard to see from a moving vantage point, Hannah said. But the week she and Jesse got engaged she tried to tell us as best she could. She’s excited and anxious in turns. At night the questions swarm. Does she have the right person, right motive, right vision? How do you even define love, when it wears so many faces?
But she loved the time they went to the library and dropped off their books and read one of her favorite Mary Oliver poems. He brought her flowers the week her housing plans fell through and cooked her dinner when she was too tired to do it herself. A lifetime is a vast unknown. But one meal, one project, one good-morning at a time—they can do that. And it’s less like walking off a cliff than taking the next step along a half-illumined path. Hence the trivets like stepping stones. The pattern grows as it unfolds. She would always be leaning toward him, even if she’d told him no.
In our brief reunion before the wedding we listen to her, reaching together for the right words of blessing. May this love last, we say. May it stretch outward even as it deepens between you, sheltering and cheering those you meet along your road. May it find itself someday stronger than fear. May the light fall and the pieces cohere, making you together into a sign and living word of the love of God.
“The Next ‘Good Morning’” — Trivet Set
Porcelain, Mishima Carving, Gold Lustre
2021
“White Walls and Coffee”
Swirled Porcelain and Brown Stoneware, Gold Lustre
2021
~ Micah & Lydia ~
“In a time of global instability, the giving of oneself is not the first thing people reach for. But that’s what we’re choosing in marriage.”
Micah and Lydia have been married for a month when I come over with a sketchbook full of questions. Lydia left a job in Japan, the life behind her like a room bright and chaotic and crowded with plants. She carries the buds with her now. My brother left grad school about as reluctantly as one leaves a carton of spoiled milk.
The new life they’re building is still mostly potential: they say it has the look of white walls and the smell of coffee. They talk about learning to accept forgiveness, to receive love when they feel lovable and when they don’t. Gather your courage, they say. Any rebirth is a kind of death. The old self, with its freedoms and allegiances and ego-trips, has to yield to a love that is larger and more abundant. And the planters line up on the windowsill, waiting for the life that fills and overflows them.
Plants from left to right: Geranium, Rex Begonia, Kalanchoe
~ Deirdre ~
Our friend Deirdre moved from Indianapolis to Chicago this summer, unemployed for the first time since childhood. In unemployment, she found aching purposelessness, uncomfortable dependance, and beautiful rest. Standing in this door frame, her thoughts run to poems and prayers. Here are her words:
Silence
A moment of silence You’ve given me
You’ve barred all safe paths of retreat
You bid me be still in the shadows
I strain to hear screams in the street.
This place that I’m in, I can’t see it
No light shows me where are the walls
There’s everything here but there’s nothing
A museum of paint in a bowl.
I grope for a door or a window
I slam my face into a stone
My hands seek a seat I can rest on
I find but a ghost of a throne.
Once I thought I knew what my way was
I poured out the best I could do
Now here where my compass is spinning
You say, “Let Me pour into you.”
-Deirdre Kelley, 2020
Silence
Swirled Porcelain and Brown Stoneware, Gold Lustre
2021
Detail of interior.
~ Elise & Dagi ~
Detail of nesting capacity.
Elise and Dagi are from Indiana and Ethiopia, respectively. She’s carrying their first child. It’s like bearing good news, Elise says—through the months of pandemic, she’s walked in a glow of hope. She talks about God at work inside her body like an artist at play. Dagi hopes their child will be a rebel in this time: bi-ethnic in a fragmented world, that she or he will build bridges and drink deeply of love and truth together.
There is so much they know they’re not ready for. How do you prepare to become responsible for another life, from now until always? They reach for friends who’ve walked this road before. The usual sacrifices loom up: the loss of time and sleep and space, the commitment to put another’s needs permanently before their own. Over tea one night I ask what they are gaining.
An unimaginable good, they say. This child who is from them, who makes them a family—this child will be born into a love exultant at the fact of its being. As the nesting bowls enclose and protect, and also open and offer up, so they will be to one another. Shyly they say that they may come to understand the love of God.
Close-up of Bowl #3 of six.
“Like Bearing Good News” — Nested Bowl Set
Brown Stoneware, Mishima Carving, Gold Lustre
2021
“Under What Bright Wings…”
Brown Stoneware, Gold Lustre
2021
~ Kindra ~
Before the pandemic, Kindra’s kindergarten classroom had a table for ferns and owl pellets, and a pet lizard named Diamond. There’s breath and inspiration in the space she shares with her children. She’s interested in what they have to say. They obey her readily, out of love and not coercion. Like the bell that shelters the pieces of a wind-chime, her presence protects and upholds and amplifies the dignity of the students in her care.
She has children of her own as well, and she tells me that she prays for all the things that most moms pray for: that people see her children’s humanity and not just their complexion, that her husband is safe when he leaves the house. She prays for her students—their families and home lives and safety and health. She prays for her friends in their busy lives, asking for peace and joy in a world filled with tempting and superficial substitutes. She prays she is brave.
“I hope that my presence, my energy, helps create a peaceful future,” she says. When I see her teaching, I catch a glimpse of how it might do just that.
Pieces of the wind-chime, before they were strung together and suspended under the bell part.
Detail of the bell’s loop.
Under the Tutelage of
Wisdom & Wonder
Under the Tutelage of Wisdom & Wonder
I met Grandma Bornman through one of her granddaughters, my friend Laurel. Laurel, Jody, Leah, and I were looking for a place for a reunion, and she welcomed us into her home with bread pudding and real milk—the stuff that comes from a cow, not a store. I’ve been back to visit several times since.
Grandma Bornman is a Mennonite who loves to learn the hymns of other church traditions, a woman of prayer who dwells on the stories of God’s faithfulness to her. Her humor is understated: she tells me that the sour cherries will make me “whistle the doxology” and that “hanging out” is for shirttails. She has a closet of preserves and quilts like cathedral windows.
Her younger granddaughters live ten minutes away, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a pair of children more endlessly interested in the world around them. They keep a guest book for the birds and squirrels that grace their yard. (The squirrels have names.) The younger girl climbs trees with the dexterity of a cat and the elder is learning to bake. Each has her own garden plot, which overflows with tomatoes, onions, dill, and a dozen other vegetables.
Together, Grandma Bornman and her granddaughters have become a picture of wisdom and wonder for me. Maybe you’ve seen the New Year’s drawing of the old man and the child? That’s a Janus image, too, interesting when it meets the particulars of time and place. Here wisdom is not cynical, nor wonder unwise. In the presence of both, I offer you the invitation my friends extended to me. Take a seat. Take your time. Take in this sweep of abundance and color and song, and let it draw you a little further down the paths of peace.
A Portrait of Wisdom
Porcelain, Black Underglaze
2021
More with Less: Kima
Porcelain, Iron Image Transfer, Mishima Carving
2021
“The Way He Liked It” Fruitcake without Citron
Porcelain, Iron Image Transfer, Mishima Carving
2021
Tending Abundance Garden Plate — Carrots
Porcelain, Mishima Carving
2021
Tending Abundance Garden Plate — Beets
Porcelain, Mishima Carving
2021
All the Way My Savior Leads
Red Stoneware
2021
Tending Abundance Garden Plate — Sour Cherry
Porcelain, Mishima Carving
2021
My Jesus I Love Thee
Red Stoneware
2021
Tending Abundance Garden Plate — Beets
Porcelain, Mishima Carving
2021
In Christ Alone
Red Stoneware
2021
Tending Abundance Garden Plate — Sour Cherry
Porcelain, Mishima Carving
2021
More with Less: Cornbread
Porcelain, Iron Image Transfer, Mishima Carving
2021
First Fruits Garden Plate — Black Beauty Eggplant
Porcelain, Mishima Carving
2021
“Two Horses”
Porcelain, Iron Image Transfer
2021
First Fruits Garden Plate — Early Girl Tomato
Porcelain, Mishima Carving
2021
A Portrait of Wonder 1
Porcelain, Black Underglaze
2021
First Fruits Garden Plate — Red Onions
Porcelain, Mishima Carving
2021
First Fruits Garden Plate — Crooked Neck Squash
Porcelain, Mishima Carving
2021
First Fruits Garden Plate — Crooked Neck Squash
Porcelain, Mishima Carving
2021
A Portrait of Wonder 2
Porcelain, Black Underglaze
2021
“Best In Show”
Porcelain, Iron Image Transfer
2021
Serendipity Garden Plate — Carrots
Porcelain, Mishima Carving
2021
Serendipity Garden Plate — “Accidental Lettuce”
Porcelain, Mishima Carving
2021
Serendipity Garden Plate — Beans
Porcelain, Mishima Carving
2021
“Cats on a Ladder”
Porcelain, Iron Image Transfer
2021
Serendipity Garden Plate — Sweet Williams
Porcelain, Mishima Carving
2021
Show Credits
Janus is a partnership and a conversation. Becca made the pottery—she’s embarking on her eleventh year of ceramics now, and growing ever more comfortable at the intersection of story and shape. Leah, gardener and grad student, did the writing. This is the third show we’ve collaborated on, and we had a ridiculously good time doing it. (We also had a lot of late nights and wacky phone conversations, which was likely part of the fun.)
But because of COVID restrictions and other 2020 quirks, Leah wasn’t able to be part of all the interviews for the “Faces of Love” stories. Becca took notes and we talked the pieces over, but the speaker in those stories is a sort of composite character: an “I” who stands in Becca’s place and speaks Leah’s words. (It sounds a little strange, but writers do it all the time.) We were both honored to be a part of telling these stories.
Leah also carved the garden plates for “…Wisdom and Wonder,” in partnership with Katie, and Rachel labored meticulously over the hymns. That’s just skimming the surface of acknowledgments: each one of these shows relies on an extensive foundation of encouragement, logistical wizardry, and random last-minute-errand-runnings of friends and family. You know who you are. Great thanks to all of you for facilitating this exploration of the in-between.