Saturday, November 13, 2010

317. Moulding the clay


Janie’s mother is a potter. She takes a lump of dun-coloured earth and creates something out of nothing. She uses her entire body in this production: her hands, her knees, her feet and the strength of her shoulders. She transforms a lump of nothing much into a thing of beauty. As the wheel turns, the hands caress, tiny flexes of finger muscles are transformed into form and utility.

Her foot pounds the pedal. She hunches her shoulders to the wheel, as her hands hover over the spinning formless clay. Small drops of water fly off at high speed. Fine corrugations encircle the clay. Her brain coordinates both hand and eye, keeps them on the straight and narrow. Her brain transforms a pattern of its own devising.

How ironical that even though Janie’s mother creates beautiful pots, she has a black thumb. She is not a gardener. She is a potter.

3 comments:

Brian Miller said...

you know...there is something sensual about a potters wheel...not a bad gig i would think...smiles.

Julie said...

Following on from some comments from Jeffm, I am trying to write some of these for the next week or so in the present tense. I want also to have some sentences more active and others more passive.

Joan Elizabeth said...

This is Julie using simpler sentence forms and I always feel they come out rather childlike and jumpy ... sorry.

And yet you paint such beautiful detail.