Clay metaphors
When I lost my way with the writing earlier this year, I kept this blog going because so many people told me they had a use for it. I also kept going with the poetry, in part because it is the least commercially orientated thing I do. I’ve written poetry since childhood, and since before the age when I could confidently manage a narrative. I’ve written it to unravel things, to cope and make sense of life – as a teenager it’s a cheaper, and more private option than therapy. In more recent years it’s become less about the navel gazing, more about the desire to share.
Yesterday I finished typing up a set of poems that I might venture out into the world with. I read them out loud, start to end because I wanted a sense of the piece as a whole. At this point it became apparent that there were some themes. The hill and the barrow are regular presences – not a great surprise there. That’s a place I go to seek inspiration and to connect with land, sky and ancestors. There are a startling number of clay references and metaphors, doubly surprising because they were all in the mix before I even thought about becoming a studio assistant for a ceramicist. Something was in the air, perhaps.
I like clay as a metaphor. Fundamentally earthy, clay comes to you in wet lumps, but with love, skill and effort can be transformed into incredible things – the useful, the beautiful, the ornamental. Tending to see myself as a lumpy wet clay sort of person, physically and spiritually, that scope to be more elegantly shaped appeals to me. Then there’s the firing process, that entirely changes the material substance of the clay.
There was a potter in my childhood – one Pete Brown – who round here is now rather collectable. I’ve recently been gifted with four beautiful mugs of his making. I get excited about pottery. It’s a very old technology, and a critical one for human civilisation, allowing the storage of water, food, oil, medicines, enabling us to eat grains. Although my insight is minimal, I know that ceramics are incredible materials, and that we are just scraping the surface of what it might be possible to do with what is, essentially, baked earth.
Little wonder, then, that I keep coming back to clay as a metaphor. I haven’t worked with clay in a hands-on way since my late teens. It was something I used to love doing. I do not know if there is something in the nature of clay that craves the opportunity to be shaped, but there’s something in the nature of me that most certainly does.
