pottery by Ayumi Horie
Ayumi Horie’s pots show finger marks from where they’re gripped & dunked in glaze. The finger marks are like bruises: sensitive yet careless, traces of purposeful activity. Ayumi combines a dry throwing technique with hand-building; her forms have fluidity of gesture but a wonky, firm structure beneath. Old forms recur (teapots, mugs) and new forms arise (cage-like vases, divided dishes, bowls with handles, a “match striker”), tweaking possibilities of function. They are generously proportioned, but there is delicacy to their heft. For awhile, they’ve been red earthenware, with drawings scratched into biscuit-colored glaze. The drawings are populated by animals, characters that recur, and a few props from their world (a tree, a sink). Color glaze marks echo the fingerprints, add layers of editorial intention, of feeling.
Animals, though? Here’s the thing: I’m no potter. My eyes float to the surface, not to the foot. How can Ayumi expect otherwise? On one pot is a goat. On another’s a goat and a chicken. On several is a hulking, hollow-eyed monkey. Mysteriously, one some, the monkey lurks near some shelves. A bird on monkey’s shoulder. Birds in a tree (many birds, many trees). The shelves, empty, all by themselves! A haunting mythology. I read them like horoscopes and shop accordingly, neurotically.
I’m at Ayumi’s studio sale. Her studio is a church she restored, in (the hamlet of) Cottekill, NY. She has sales intermittently, with friends. The sanctuary has stained-glass windows; there’s a smell of baking muffins from the woodburning stove. There is light and air around tables and racks and cabinets of pottery.
Full disclosure: Ayumi’s work set my indifference to ceramics on its ear, even before the animal pictures. I’m sure the pots with animal drawings sell well: they are charming and dark and funny. The overlaid marks are expressive, but separate, as if the inner lives of these characters float before them in an ether. Each variation in composition builds a story; characters recur, interact. As scenarios and motifs repeat, the potter’s work becomes a scattered, dragged-out animation. But then, isn’t making teapot after teapot, bowl after bowl after bowl a kind of animation too?
The drawings suggest vignettes of love and labor; to me, they’re heartbreaking. It’s the push-pull that gets me. I’m not at the point of being able to articulate it, but it’s something that I want this blog to be about. How the very experience of shopping for at Ayumi’s pottery sale, of projecting myself into the stories on the surface of her pots, then pulling away, realizing I’m losing track of the central formal dialogue, mirrors something about making & choosing things amid things’ overabundance. A feeling that I can’t relate to art, or anything, but then somehow that I do.
Is that what Ayumi is getting at when she writes about the role of comfort in her work? Functional pottery in general seems uniquely poised to answer this angst I’m describing, but a lot of the time when I look at it it seems like just more stuff. Maybe it’s that Ayumi’s work bears the marks of struggle, or maybe that it transforms them into marks of love, offhand skill, intention. Maybe it’s that her fat, well-balanced forms fit well into my life, allow some reverence for its raw edges.
Am I talking about an ethics of design, or not just that?
[at left is a sad sink mug I bought a couple years ago when Ayumi parked herself and some pots in the Artstream trailer outside NYC’s Museum of Arts and Design — complete with permanent coffee dribble stain at the tap; at middle is a mug I bought at the October sale; & at right is a mug that mysteriously materialized in my bag, later.]
