Paulus Berensohn Quote
Here's a great quote from Paulus Berensohn regarding clay. This quote has made my day on many occasions. I hope that you find inspiration in it too! If you haven't picked up Berensohn's book, Finding One's Way with Clay, it's a fabulous book and one every potter should own. It journals his experience with pinchpots. His forms are incredible. I was lucky enough to meet this man when I worked at Clayground in Cambridge, MA.
"A clue picked up my ears when I read that there are 90,000 sense receptors per square inch on human finger tip. Imagine that! 90,000 tiny satellite dishes listening, 90,000 antennas broadcasting, 90,000 rootlets drinking interdependancy, making connection. "Hands:" conscious hands-on-clay.
This "information" was on a page of a book. It fired my imagination It came into my body and my fingertips began to tremble. They tremble every time I think "90,000" or speak it out. The clay smiles and I tremble. This is one of the two most powerful possibilities I have to offer as a teacher of clay. I keep saying it, 90,000, like a mantra, hoping I'll be overheard by those willing to receive it.
The other threshold deeper into what pinching clay has to give us came into consciousness one day in a small article in the New York Times, or was it Newsweek magazine, or did I dream it: about the work of a Dr. Leila Coyne at the University of California at San Jose, who says that if you were to hit a one pound ball of clay wiht a hammer it would give off ultraviolet light for a month! A month? I was, am, staggered. Finding that bit of information and attempting to live it in my body has changed everything.
Every time we pinch clay, coil it, roll it into slabs or form it on the potter's wheel, we are releasing light, palpating energy with our 90,000 sense receptors per square inch of fingertip, whether we know it or not. I want to know it. God knows how I want to know it! I changed the title of my pinching workshops to "shining clay" in an atempt to generate awe and wonder for the light that lives in and radiates out of living clays-and knowing it in the biblical sense of "knowing". Soon, I'm to give another evolution of the workshops that have birthed this book. All I have so far is its public title, "Clay and the Cosmic Story". Privately I'm hoping to have the courage and/or foolishness to call it "Hands on God: the reciprocity between our human senses and the more than human sensuous loam of the earth with its story-telling stones, with its life-giving clays"."
"A clue picked up my ears when I read that there are 90,000 sense receptors per square inch on human finger tip. Imagine that! 90,000 tiny satellite dishes listening, 90,000 antennas broadcasting, 90,000 rootlets drinking interdependancy, making connection. "Hands:" conscious hands-on-clay.
This "information" was on a page of a book. It fired my imagination It came into my body and my fingertips began to tremble. They tremble every time I think "90,000" or speak it out. The clay smiles and I tremble. This is one of the two most powerful possibilities I have to offer as a teacher of clay. I keep saying it, 90,000, like a mantra, hoping I'll be overheard by those willing to receive it.
The other threshold deeper into what pinching clay has to give us came into consciousness one day in a small article in the New York Times, or was it Newsweek magazine, or did I dream it: about the work of a Dr. Leila Coyne at the University of California at San Jose, who says that if you were to hit a one pound ball of clay wiht a hammer it would give off ultraviolet light for a month! A month? I was, am, staggered. Finding that bit of information and attempting to live it in my body has changed everything.
Every time we pinch clay, coil it, roll it into slabs or form it on the potter's wheel, we are releasing light, palpating energy with our 90,000 sense receptors per square inch of fingertip, whether we know it or not. I want to know it. God knows how I want to know it! I changed the title of my pinching workshops to "shining clay" in an atempt to generate awe and wonder for the light that lives in and radiates out of living clays-and knowing it in the biblical sense of "knowing". Soon, I'm to give another evolution of the workshops that have birthed this book. All I have so far is its public title, "Clay and the Cosmic Story". Privately I'm hoping to have the courage and/or foolishness to call it "Hands on God: the reciprocity between our human senses and the more than human sensuous loam of the earth with its story-telling stones, with its life-giving clays"."
posted by neoteric girl at Wednesday, November 02, 2005
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