Cup and Lid Set of 4

I have a recurring “thing”. I tend to like to make pieces that have some kind of contrast. Rough/Smooth. Hard/Soft. Light/Dark. That kind of thing. The combination of ceramics and either steel or wood is a favorite contrast to explore. Ceramic represents Earth. I mean that’s not too far of a stretch, right? The clay is from the soil, the dirt.  In college the saying in the ceramics classes was “It’s just dirt ’till it’s fired.” (There’s something a little “ashes to ashes” about that but that’s another post.)

The contrast of wood with ceramics is one of temperature. There’s a warmth to wood. There’s a flexibility too.  You can sense in a piece of wood the tree that it used to be. Bending against the wind; stretching toward the sun. Wood is still earthy. The trees are nourished by and grown from the earth. Branches break and leaves fall back to the ground. The fungi and microbes breakdown the decaying matter; which becomes soil; which feeds the branches that break and the leaves that fall. (There’s that ashes to ashes again.)  In that contrast of material there’s also a unity of origin. They’re of this planet of ours in a primal way.

Steel is from the earth too. Shaped by millions of years of geology, it becomes ore in the ground. Iron spread across the universe from the the collapse of the oldest stars becomes the ore we mine, smelt and fabricate.  It’s once removed in the family tree but of the three it’s more primordial. Steel requires the most human industry to produce.

This is turning into a rambling way of saying that while we are all unique and have our differences; we are all of this world and universe. So while it is fun to explore the contrast between things, it can always come back to the unity of things.