Born Things

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Shoji Hamada

How easy it is to slip into busy. Busy, and disconnected from the core of things. This morning I found a needed course correction courtesy of Sarah Robinson‘s Nesting:

Cognitive scientists tell us that it takes time for the conscious mind to extract latent patterns within a diversity of superficially different experiences. In our idle moments, in the gaps between our activities our minds are busy connecting the threads of our experiences. Idelness can allow epistemic openings, where apparently separate notions mingle and recombine in surprising ways. If these gaps are plugged up by more data, creative synthesis is blocked.

Robinson goes on to reference the master potter Shoji Hamada whose work and life is the subject of Bernard Leach‘s Hamada, Potter. In speaking about his work, Hamada said it did not come from “my mind, it came but from my whole body; it emerged out of my middle, my lower abdomen. I have such a good feeling about having done this pot…This work does not come out of my thought; rather I simply permit the movement that my hands have learned over many years. In fact, in the work forged by my body during sixty years, there is an unconscious revelation. I sense that my work has become more comfortable…I now hope that, rather than made things, born things will increase in my work.”

Robinson continues this line of thought:

The Japanese believe that your hara, their term for the core of your being, lives about two inches above and one inch in from your navel. The attentive mind is not circumscribed in the compass of our skulls, it is close to our belly button.

Creativity is in the body. Those were the first words spoken to me by my dancer friend Joe Gifford, now 92, the first time he came to my studio many years ago. No better mantra for every day, in the studio or out.

8 comments

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December 14, 2012 at 10:03 am

Nancy Natale

Deborah, I really enjoyed this post. It reminded me of what Leonardo Drew said about making work when I heard him speak at the Decordova Museum. I quoted him on my blog: He said it “was not just the combination of materials, but of ideas.” He believes that these ideas are “already in your body, like DNA.” There is “some form of history that flows through each of us and then comes out. Then we have to move on.” He says that the progression of his work came organically as he worked through one form to another. He has noticed that “the more he touches things, the better they get.” This sounds very similar to what Hamada was saying. Thank you.

December 14, 2012 at 4:38 pm

Deborah Barlow

Nancy, Thank you for reminding me of Drew’s comments. I remember reading those on your blog and they are a perfect compliment to Hamada’s. I appreciate the value add!

December 14, 2012 at 10:41 am

Maureen