2024 Culinary and Ceramic Experience – Margo Brown

I’m drawn to practical things—objects meant for everyday use.  As a potter, I want my work to reflect my love of both beauty and utility.  Each pot I make is a thread from me to the pot’s user, a thread connecting us.  For me, making pots is a way of making relationships with other people, my fellow human beings with whom I share life.

     I’ve read that when one works with clay—shaping it, turning it—it begins to vibrate and this vibration, however slight, however little we are aware of it, goes on for years.  In being shaped as a pot, clay comes to life.  I want this life to be an active one and so I imagine a mug being used in a pickup truck and then resting on the floor until it’s time to go in the house to be washed and used again. Maybe this time by a person sitting outside watching the sky, or inside reading late into the night.  I picture pots going from the shelf into someone’s hands, pots being carried around the house.  I like to think of beautiful food finding a home on pottery I’ve made. 

     I can feel the vibrating pot that I’ve held in my hands now held in someone else’s hands.  It’s a plate with a large piece of chocolate cake.  When the pleasure of eating is over, the plate still holds a few smears of chocolate.  Or it’s a bowl of soup and finished eating, someone sets the bowl down for a pet who licks it clean.

     All this is to say that I want to be connected to other beings and through pottery, I am.