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Linda Sikora is one of our most thoughtful and articulate makers of functional pots. A conversation with her can be a journey through the cultural history of the last century or a thoughtful reflection on what happens in her studio. A single sentence might start with the finial atop a pot she just made and end in a reflection about poetics.
      When I talked to her in the fall of 2003, I had seen her Ferrin Gallery exhibition that featured teapots and covered jars the previous summer. The pots were strongly based in historic European porcelain traditions, yet had a playfulness and contemporary feeling that seemed to include other histories. It was as if Staffordshire somehow had met the pattern enamels of Tomimoto and been reborn alive in flowing movement. The forms were well structured yet unrestrained; ruffles and pinches in the soft porcelain surfaces animated selected panels in the rigorously thrown shapes. The detailing was fierce: spiraling and sometimes pierced finials, complexly profiled handles, sweeping slab-built spouts, crisply turned feet. The surfaces too seemed to dance around the strong shapes—for as fancy and fanciful as these pots were, they spoke insistently of function. Rich patterns of glazes trailed adjacent to one another tessellated around the pots in geometric exuberance. And the surfaces were just holding their patterned clarity; a bit more time in the kiln, a touch more heat and the whole thing would flow into illegibility. Pyroplasticity, that fusion without collapse, was displayed with a stunning wit, pleasure, and virtuosity.
      Linda’s work took an unusual turn several years ago when she completely stopped applying glaze and made a series of white pots—round porcelain shapes, simply wood and salt fired. Before that, the pots she had been making were generally more worked, using post-wheel manipulation, construction, and polychrome surfaces. These white pots, on the other hand, showed only slight fire marking and a soft salt sheen. (She fires with wood to good orange heat, then switches to oil drip to maturity, so ash deposit and flashing are minimal). They were insistently round—a careful study in proportion, scale, and detailing within symmetrical circular volumes. Clearly this work represented a moment of questioning, a gathering of information and energy.
       Our conversation took place in the fall of 2003.

- Mark Shapiro

White pots

When I started to do this work, part of the motivation was to find out what was underneath the glaze. I felt that I didn’t really know what was under there. It was inspired by Staffordshire, of course. But I wondered if white work could hold some of the energy that was starting to become apparent in the glazed work.
      The pots went from being very constructed to being quite round. And it scared me a little bit, quite frankly. Oh my God—here I am! Part of this reaction had to do with the fact that I was coming out of graduate school, and my work there had had all this color and construction. But I knew that in my house I liked to use simpler pots.
      With the white pots, I knew each one had to stand as it was. I started to become more articulate in the handling; the role I asked of the finial or handle or the structure of the body shifted because I was asking it to become a completely articulate piece. It wasn’t a blank to be glazed. Knowing that they wouldn’t be glazed humbled me to the forming process.
      When I dropped the patterns, I really exposed to myself what it was to handle the material in its wet state. The thing about pushing and sort of ruffling or tweaking is that it’s got a spirit and an energy that is about play. And so much more: it has to do with gender and history, and also just human touch. It still holds my attention in terms of associations it causes. So that’s when the form started changing. I still make work that I intend not to glaze and I’m still interested in that white work. In a given run of pots, I don’t always predetermine which ones will be glazed. A piece can be a complete thought without the polychrome surface only if the character is right: the right accumulation of qualities, of gestures of hand and mind in the making…you may have a piece that refuses glaze. That’s what it felt like, a refusal.  But also, as I came to the glaze cycle, both started to come together, in a truer dialogue than they were in before. Really, the dialogue between those two aspects of the process became much more complex, though I hope it can become complex without becoming complicated. Without complicating the simple or simplifying the complex.

Roundness
 
The work I did in grad school was constructed, off-round, with blocks of color. This may have had something to do with the built and cast work of 18th c. Europe, or with the lack of interest in round pots at the time…and I can’t discount my lack of throwing experience. After graduate school I became much more interested in round forms that I was seeing in the world. That meant I had to address my throwing in a different way—it’s one thing to make a piece that you are going to cut up and it’s another to make a pot out of a whole solid piece of clay. So I started to readdress what it was to throw. I was using and seeing all these round pots, but I was confused about what interested me about them. I thought it was that they were simple. Simplified. At first my work became really simplified, and I got lost because that didn’t engage me: it was really the roundness that interested me. I needed to have a certain amount of intensity around each form and for it just to get round and for all the glaze to go away… I didn’t know where I was. But then I figured out that I wanted them to be round because I was learning something about throwing and about the rhythm and movement of glaze patterns and I was excited by that.


Need

I was recently giving a demonstration and I was trimming and talking about how I used to never trim. It had to do with throwing the whole form. I had all these very clever ways to resolve a pot without trimming. But then suddenly I needed it… There was no way I could get what I needed, which was something about under that belly. I needed to get to the underbelly. And I had no idea what that meant, but I needed to get there. Someone else might never need to get there but I did; it felt like a real question to me. So the trimming started to happen. And lo and behold it became a significant part of the language of the work. What happens underneath the pot is also connected to the finials, and what happens on the edges where the lids meet the rim. All of it came out of a deep-seated need: the same kind of need as when I wanted to get under the glaze. [In my last kiln, I really got the right temperature for the pots because it pushed them to the edge of being able to survive, even in their very structure because of pyroplasticity. This, too, is something about need. If they were just a little hotter or had just a little more salt, then I would get a certain quality—but then the glaze would start to move, and then I would need to do something else. Maybe how you identify need—how you say in your work or your process what you need—is the momentum in the work. Maybe what you describe as a leap in the work [in the pots for the Ferrin Gallery show] happened where I was able to identify a need that I hadn’t been able to before.

The pleasure of thought

Two weeks ago, I was reading a collection of essays, The Language of Inquiry, by the poet Lyn Hejinian. I’ve been particularly interested in reading about how poets use language—how language lives in the world and what it does. How ubiquitous it is and how we use it. As I was reading this text, I substituted pots for language and poetics. For example, the process of making pots becomes a vehicle for life inquiries. Because it is so recognizable and familiar, we sometimes forget this. Like my needing to know what’s under the glaze. Why would that even occur to anybody to need to know that? A lot of people making work with incredibly complex surfaces may never ask that question. But somehow, just because of whatever my story is, I have a real question about what’s underneath there. It’s not just a formal question or a historical question. It seems to me it’s a question about identity, too. What is it to be a person in the world? I am Canadian or I am American or I am Arab or I am European. What is that and then what is it to be in the world as human and how do you interact as a human? So when I’m in the studio I find myself thinking, and playing with thinking as material, as a way to try to understand my own life in absence, to generate my own sense of meaning about what I do. This idea of getting underneath and seeing what was underneath and seeing the form is connected to a question I have about how pots live in the world—they’re both invisible and visible.

I am very interested in thinking as a way, not just to really know something, but as a way to experience something. Poetry, you know, says the unspeakable. And thinking can approach the unknowable. I was interested in how Hejinian talked about acknowledgement. To acknowledge something isn’t to know it, but rather to be able to understand that it is there. To approach it without knowing what it is. I’m excited about what I reveal to myself when I try to articulate what I’m thinking. It’s a very personal experience. It gives me great pleasure. It’s just deeply pleasurable.

Visible/Invisible

I’m interested in the way that pots can be highly visible objects sitting in the gallery, where you can’t touch them. Or they can completely disappear into domestic activity. The same object does two things and is expressed in two very different forms. I’m so excited by the way it traverses these spaces. Once someone asked me, ‘So it’s okay with you if nobody uses your pots, if no one touches them?’ And I said, ‘It has to be, doesn’t it?’ I’m making these things, and often in the process that one object is sitting six inches from my nose. You can look at it one to one, and maybe it’s good sometimes to put your hands behind your back or put them in your pockets and just look at it. Because it does have something to say as an object, as form and color and human activity and sheer will: as expression in the world. It sometimes helps to keep your hands off and look a little closer. But then, it ends up in the house and it’s in another kind of context where it’s something you can pick up and use, and you can judge it on that level. Are you compelled to pick it up? If you do, does it perform well? Do you gain pleasure out of that? I think it’s wonderful if people can pick up a teapot of mine and use it. But do I think it’s bad if they just look at it? If it really rocks their boat, go ahead, just look at the thing. But of course, I expect it to perform in a manner that is excellent on the terms of its purported function, too.

My point is that I’m really making pots to be in both those places. I’m not making them to be in one or the other. And I don’t value one over the other. I actually think pots are powerful in the way they move between those places. The big jars I’m making, for example, are not going to be picked up and carried around. You might put something in them, but I made those really to fill my own frame. I wanted them to be twice as big as my head. I wanted to feel what potting was on that level. So that’s a different kind of pot and they may be more deliberately about being looked at. The teapots, I think, are wonderful in the way they’re so attended to and they can be so satisfying to use. And they work well. That’s the thing about visible and invisible. Highly visible, not visible: I hope my pots foster attention and inattention. That activity in between, the way it traverses those spaces, is deeply, deeply interesting to me. Actually, it is a big question in my life.

Pots in the Academy

The way pottery moves between the visible public sphere and the invisible domestic space is part of the reason why it doesn’t really fit in academia and we don’t know what to do with it. Or in the culture at large, or in galleries: Is it art or not? Pottery is messy, it doesn’t fit the tidiness of categorization, the expectation of what happens where. But the way functional pots traverse those places makes them a powerful practice in the culture right now. Of course I believe that pots should be seen in the culture of academia more than they are. As Paul Greenhalgh says, craft has a kind of true interdisciplinarity that is perhaps the next stage of postmodernism, with its dissolving of and play with concepts and notions and categories and practices and cultures and spaces. I hope that academia is a place where that can be explored. Even if it doesn’t have the intellectual support or scholarship yet, I think it’s growing. In academia maybe you can make a place that holds parts of the paradigm that the culture learns from, or model something for the culture.

[There is something about being a potter in an academic environment where to be there at all, you have to understand the animal and not get discouraged by ignorance about functional work, so that you can really use what the academy provides to move the dialogue along. To do that you need to be aware of different points of view. When you are a minority you need to know—it’s like street smarts. I do wish people had a more diverse way of thinking, though at Alfred, there is more a place for function that at many art institutes that are geared to conceptual art. Even at Alfred, which has a tremendous history based in craft, sometimes there isn’t the expertise or facility or interest to teach function. It matters how you present or do not present function to the students. I’ve brought this up within the institution and the reception has been very open.]

I would argue that choosing a form like a functional pot has no more limitations than any other form, than video or sound or sculpture or any visual art form. It’s not so much the form that is the issue, maybe, but the notion of the familiar. So how do you make the familiar work for you? How do you make the familiar your material? How does that serve as subject when you’re an artist? A lot of my intellectual query has been about trying to understand what the familiar is and what it does, in positive ways, in negative ways. What are the spaces it lives in.

Imagination

Lyn Hejinian’s writing about how Gertrude Stein looked at the differences between public and private spaces in ancient Greece is very interesting to me in this regard. Then, the polis was the cultural space, where men would go and share their ideas. That was supposed to be about freedom of speech. That was the free space, the male space, the public space, the political space. And then there was domestic space, which was the woman space and also the space of slaves. Gertrude Stein raises the question, is the political male space really the space of freedom? Where is the mind truly free?

In the public space, I am Linda Sikora, artist. But in the private space, in the studio, the ‘I’ disappears. This, Stein would say, is freedom. Where masterpieces can be made. She wrote this little sentence: ‘I am I not any longer when I see.’ In the studio when you are really in your work and you are really seeing your work and you are deeply engaged, completely engaged, the ‘I’ disappears. She argues that the true freedom of thought comes from those spaces. You could say that is the studio space, or if you are thinking about objects and functional pots, you could say it’s the kitchen space or it’s the domestic space too. And that’s very interesting because for me, pots are imagination. Pots are in the world as expression, as artistic expression…

Why does someone take a piece home? They take it home because it reflects themselves back to themselves, right? Ultimately in some way, shape, or form, it becomes connected to who they think they are. So I would say, when they take the piece home, they take home their own imagination. Sure they’re taking home the potter’s imagination, too. If you stay with Stein’s idea about the home being the place of the true freedom to think in the human mind—well, one Sunday morning drinking tea I realized how potent that is. I have this teapot that I made, and often on Sunday morning when I might read and write, I use this pot. I don’t use it during the week. I was sitting there and thinking about this issue of the household space and imagination, and I realized that this pot was about so many things. For example, it was only about tea on Sunday morning. It’s a small teapot and a small cup and there’s the specific thing I’m going to do. The act of filling up the cup with tea and drinking it. Very different from a big cup that is too hot first and then it’s cold cold cold cold, but I keep drinking it. This little cup is hot every time I refill it, and so it does this wonderful thing of slowing time down because I’m sitting there and the tea is always hot again. Then when I see it sitting on the windowsill during the rest of the week, the teapot is about slow time, and thinking time and writing time. That’s the imagination part, the part I build up around it once I take it home. So pots live in that private space, the place where Stein says masterpieces come from, in the truly free-est space of the human mind. It’s interesting, what it means for an artist to choose to house their imagination in the most familiar, in a thing that becomes connected to us in the body.

Collaboration

It’s easy to have beliefs but it’s something else to know what they are. I suppose finding out what they are gets back to what I was saying earlier, about how doing the work makes you identify what you need. That’s a process that’s both internal—my need to think about what’s under the glaze, for example—and external, like when you get excited about a pot in a museum. I started thinking, well, some people call these sources, which is interesting because source implies that you go find it. You go to the source. That is the gesture of going toward. Then I thought, some people call them influences, which suggests the thing coming at you. ‘It influenced me.’ As if ‘it’ did it to you. Two ways of looking at it.

John Berger writes [in “Steps Toward a …Visible”] about how when you see something in a museum or something you might identify as source or influence, you make a decision to enter into a collaboration. You are excited by it. Why? What? It stirs something that’s alive in you. It stirs up things maybe in the form of a question, maybe in the form of identifying, acknowledging, relating, whatever it is. What got me is that he mentioned the risk involved in collaboration. You risk a loss of self. Maybe the place in your work where you enter into a collaboration and don’t lose yourself is where the work is most alive. Ultimately, maybe, you could say that you risk seeing what it is in you that attracts you. I’ve entered a collaboration with enameled Staffordshire. We’ll see where it leads. The thing about doing work that evolves over a lifetime is that there has to a willingness to risk making visible certain aspects of yourself.

Art and Engagement
I was thinking about all of the great philosophical movements of modernism and what they were trying to accomplish. And earlier even, Ruskin, and the Arts and Crafts movement, which had some great, beautiful ideas about how to live in the world. [Leave out this part, unless it’s important to you to use all the examplesOr if you just look at that fin-de-siecle, or French symbolism, or Art Nouveau –]All these movements were about creating a new vision, about getting rid of the hierarchies in the arts, in life. The Bauhaus, too. There were all these great attempts to create a kind of humanist utopia.

But do I think pots can change the world? They change the world as much as plumbing changes the world, as much as activism changes the world. I don’t think one is more significant than the other. But the question of what is underneath the glaze, of what is underneath generally, should be a really important question in the world. If it can be held in an artist’s life, even just one life, it’s held. It’s held, and it exists. It has an energy and it goes out and moves through the culture. There’s a spirit that it carries with it.

The question is whether or not you can be in the world in a way that is awake and seeing, regardless of what you are doing. Present. Engaged. Then we can take that conversation and we can make it be about a pot. Or we can make it be about other types of art practices. About completely other sorts of disciplines. About life. In my own thinking, I’m always connecting pots to that larger picture. I can’t walk into a classroom and teach out of a place that is myopic because won’t help the students once they leave. I try to teach how to be intense and focused and how to see what is right in front of you.

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