Rachel and Eric on fri 23 jan 98
We have just finished the first two Oaxacan Pottery workshops, an historic
meeting of U.S. potters with the ancient potters of Mesoamerica. After
spending a week, a timeless week, in the heart of a village of pre-Colombian
potters, we are not the same. We have witnessed and felt with our own hands
the process of their clay. In the clean sunshine beside the corn field we
gathered our clay. We turned that earth from hard lumps laboriously pulled
from the ground into a workable and strong clay, amazed that after we were
done mixing it with creek sand our clay was over half grog. This grog heavy
mixture helped us understand how it was that the pots, full of cold water,
could be set right in a cooking fire or fired in a bonfire in under an hour.
We studied with foreign eyes the hand building of our teachers, these kind
and easy masters who have allowed us into their home. These masters who make
the potting look so easy and quick, straight forward and obvious. Would that
it were. In fact, it proved to be a language as foreign to our hands as the
Zapotec these women spoke was to our ears. As we struggled with this new
language of clay our patient teachers held our pots together when our
manipulations had them, again and again, on the brink of slop. There was no
clay disaster that they could not quickly solve with a plug of clay and a
few rolls of the corn cob. As experienced potters we learned humility. We
learned that a 4,000 year old skill cannot be mastered in a week. We learned
that there is much more to be done with clay than we had even imagined. And
all the while, in the slow peace of the village, with the quiet traffic of
passing ox carts loaded with harvest, the warm sun and the chatter and
laughter of our hosts, we relearned what our souls have never forgotten,
that in this human pace there is a natural lightness and sanity. So far from
our cities and hurry, so very close to right.
My sincere thanks to all the brave potters who came to Oaxaca to share this
time, and to our wonderful teachers for opening their doors and their lives
to us.
Eric Mindling
Eric Mindling & Rachel Werling
Manos de Oaxaca
AP 1452
Oaxaca, Oax.
CP 68000
M E X I C O
http://www.foothill.net/~mindling/
telefax (951) 3-6776
email: rayeric@antequera.com
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