Diabolical Clay

Too Loud. Too Passionate. Too Opinionated. Too Quicksilver. Too Sensitive.

Too Much.

I was consoling one of my adult children last night, talking them down off the ledge of hurt feelings when I said, “Honey, it is just that we are too much for some people.”

This morning as I drink my second cup of coffee, those words are swirling around in my head.

Too Much. Too Theatrical. Too Sensitive.

I put on my skin each time I go out into public because I don’t really like going out into public that much. I don’t like being with people at the same time as I adore being with people.

I put on my costume and I perform.

Stage fright hits just before I go into a crowded room, a paralyzing millisecond of forgetting who I am supposed to be, what stories I am supposed to tell, what role I am playing today.

Because it is all theatre really.

Constructs. Slices of realities offered up begrudgingly. A sliver here, a glimpse there.

I learned very early on to hide who I was, to hide my thoughts. I learned to lie and to lie convincingly, because in that closed confessional box the priest’s snort of disbelief echoed like judgement. The burden of a whole rosary in penance is a heavy weight for a sinless six year old to carry. Good children sin and ask for forgiveness for that sin, it is a rule.

Hello Father I have sinned, here is my childish lie and in return I will take your single Hail Mary. I will kneel and offer up my penance and skip away relieved but uneasy because isn’t lying to a priest a mortal sin in itself?

I see myself in my grand daughter Amy and I see my mother in Evelyn. The female line was strong, we were strong, there was power in our shared stories and I did not have to pretend. I did not have to put on my skin to be with these women, I could be in a stage fright free zone.

Now I am the Matriarch, I hold the stories, the fragments of stories, the memories of shared pasts. Of past lives and future lives entwined in blood, my blood. I miss my mother with a sharp knife edge of longing. I grieve, I grieve, I grieve for the softness my mother brought to my sharp edges. I miss my grandmother, I miss our shared reticence to show more than a flash of our souls, offering only glimpses. Slices of ourselves that we kept for ourselves. My grandmother understood silence, she understood the need for silence.

Not all stories need to be told, though they burn with the untold telling, sometimes silence is a gift in itself.

I am relaxed and comfortable in ambiguity, the nagging voices of my teachers demanding that I explain my motivations have faded into a shared echo of memory along with the priests. It was as easy to lie to both, to make up a flippant response to the demand for articulation. They brought their own expectations and motivations to the table and only heard the words they were expecting to hear, but still the flippancy was uneasy, is an uneasy armour and so I embrace silence

I am no longer a child, I am no longer an art student.

The work, all the work has a story but I am loathe to share that story with strangers. I resist the telling as I resist a tide of expectation. The work is what it is, I offer it up, I offer it up with nothing more than a suggestion of the direction you might want to take. A sand map as fleeting and fragile as the stories in the stones.

I have been humbled and a bit overwhelmed by the offers of support that my last blog post generated. You are all very nice people, thank you. You made me smile and cry in equal measure and it was quite lovely to feel the warmth of your friendship.

My article, You are Nothing wasn’t a cry for help. Ten years ago I would have been in proper trouble if the same set of circumstances had come about, but we would have survived. This time around my daughter Veronica transferred me through some emergency cash and life went on. The residual fear was still lingering though and so that is why I wrote the article, as I had been thinking about how easy it is to suddenly be in crisis. How something so simple like an admin error can cause a spiral downwards. How vulnerable to outside forces those of us who live close to the bone really are.

Now, my dearest internets, if I needed money I would ask you. I wouldn’t write about a financial crisis or reminisce about living on the dole and hope that you responded generously to my vague hints because that isn’t my style.

Now admire this poppy, isn’t it glorious? The poppies this year are wonderful and these old fashioned “grandma’s petticoats” are flowering like mad. The Spouse is grumbling because they are in all the wrong spots, as if there is ever a right spot for a a flower but where it is happily growing. Every time I catch sight of these through my kitchen window I stop and smile. Summer is finally here, the heady fragrance of Jasmine floats on the air  delighting my soul and the bees have finally arrived. Yay.

“You’re nothing but a filthy dole bludging, fucking greenie! Look at you, YOU ARE NOTHING!  Why don’t you get off your arse and get a fucking job? Fucking dole bludging greenie cunt!”

I denied the furious accusation as it was flung at me in disgust, I denied it loudly and strongly, I yelled back, “I have never been unemployed in my life, NOT EVER.”

But it didn’t matter. My husband was unemployed and so I was nothing but a filthy dole bludger as well.  A pariah by proxy.  The fact that I had chosen to be a stay at home mum didn’t matter, nothing mattered. The pillar of the community who had abused me at a party was right, we were unemployed, so we were nothing.

It was hard to take and even now I am loathe to talk about our time on the dole because poverty leaves a scar across your soul.

It is a precarious balancing act. A tightrope act with hunger on one side, cold on the other and disdain and derision all around you. If you can just keep inching along the wire juggling the budget furiously you might be right for this week, but it only takes one small thing, one unforseen circumstance to knock you off the wire and explode the budget. And there you are, cold or hungry or telling the kids in a jolly voice that we are going to play indoor camping because the power was cut off on a Friday afternoon and all you can see ahead is a long, long weekend of darkness.

I remember once being home alone with a babe in arms as they were about to cut my power off. Back then, before the introduction of pay as you go meters, it was always cut off on a Friday afternoon. A barbaric time of the week to be disconnected. The hydro truck pulled up on the road outside and started fiddling with this long pole thing. I went cold because I knew we were about to be disconnected because I had forgotten the bloody bill again. I raced up there to see what he was doing, to see if I could convince him to “forget” to cut the power off, but if this bloke could have spat on me he would have. He looked at me like I was shit, and I knew that he would be boasting down the pub later on about cutting the power off on a damn greeny.

It is a precarious balancing act that I had mostly forgotten about, as with just The Spouse and I at home these days, finances are not as tight as they used to be.

But sometimes something will happen and bang, I am right back where I was ten years ago and I do not like it. I do not like it at all.

Recently, I took my son to see a psychiatrist, the consultation fee was $320 with a $220 rebate.  I would have found and paid much, much more as at the time David needed to see a psychiatrist very badly.

We are so lucky here in Australia, that for someone like me who does not have medical insurance, I have the safety net of medicare. At the end of the consultation I paid the bill, knowing that the rebate would be deposited in my bank account that night.

Except it wasn’t.

It wasn’t in my bank the next day, or the next.

I rang medicare and discovered that because David is legally an adult now, that he was the claimant and as his bank account wasn’t linked, a cheque would be mailed out to him in the next eight weeks. The woman on the phone was brusque and officious and extremely unhelpful and her attitude was like an icy cold bucket of poverty had been tipped over my head.  It wasn’t so much the fact that the money I had been counting on wasn’t credited to my account it was the woman’s attitude on the phone, she spoke to me like I was unimportant and stupid. This attitude of hers was enough to make me teary all day because (in hindsight) I think I was having some sort of flashback to the dark days when everything really was a struggle.

Because internet, they really were dark days and I was surprised by how little it took to make the memories of poverty come flooding back. I know that we are lucky here in Australia and my children were never starving, but they were shunned and derided for wearing second hand clothes and the wrong shoes. The abuse I described in the opening paragraph of this post was more commonplace than I care to remember.

We treat our most vulnerable members of society terribly here in Australia.

If I forget to pay a bill, these days it is because I am an artist and obviously am absentminded because ART

If I forgot to pay a bill ten years ago it was because I was irresponsible and careless and worthless because UNEMPLOYED

The three lowest groups in Australia are, the unemployed, the indigenous and the refugees.

The divide is getting broader and as money is funneled away from grass roots programmes in our most impoverished suburbs I can see a dark future ahead.

I have lost my thread but I know I am angry, I am angry that the woman on the phone made me feel worthless. I am angry about where my country is headed. I am angry that in a country that has so much there are still so many people that have nothing.

So now I will go up to the studio and fire these cups of shame that I decorated yesterday, I will think dark thoughts and I will brood on ALL the injustices in the world. And the clay will soothe me and I will remember that all life hangs by a thread, not just mine and I will not be angry anymore.

Two years ago I was invited by Adriana Christianson to contribute a blog post to the fledgling Mud Colony Community. Little did I know that invitation would result in some highly valued friendships developing.  The photo below shows some of the “mud colonists” outside Zak Chalmer’s, Valley Plains Pottery in Victoria.

l-r Kim Foale Anna-Marie, Truly Southurst, Marian Williams, Sadhana Peterson, Adriana Christianson

The language of clay is the same worldwide, the clay whispers seductively to us, there is a need to make, a compulsion that drives potters onwards, through heartbreak and catastrophe, through tears of frustration and joy. The clay is a demanding mistress and the kiln god is fickle and temperamental. Everything in my life revolves around pots,the line of a hill is the line of a bowl, the wispy cloud in a summer sky is replicated (poorly) in my skydancer series of cups. The escarpments in my landscape, the sacred hidden rockfaces are present in my work.

For me, everything comes back to mud. When I am barefoot in the garden I am centred, when I am elbow deep in clay I am centred, I am elsewhere in my mind even as I am present in the workspace. I work intuitively and I feel the presence of my mother most strongly in my studio which was built from the ashes of her life.

I am not chasing money, as money is not what drives me, perfection is my motivator. I am chasing  my idea of perfection, as I strive to make a better pot that pleases me, only me and I am endlessly surprised that people seem to like my work as well.

In February this year, I sold my share in the Off Centre Cooperative after being a member for three years. Three years of making production work to a monthly schedule taught me a lot about myself and a lot about my craft. It was a good three years as where the Off Centre is located, in the Salmanca Arts Centre is a tourist centric area and often the artists in the retail area were the first point of local contact for the tourists.  I adored being an ambassador for my state and if I ever was after a proper job I would like to work in something tourism based. If I was less sure of my direction it also could have been a soul destroying three years as my work is not fashionable, it is not white and it is not porcelain. If I was less driven to comment on all the things, I would have walked away from clay and made greeting cards instead.

My work deals with social issues, with environmental issues, with the catastrophe that is unfolding in the ocean before our very eyes and  if I didn’t make work in response I  would be standing on a street corner yelling at people.

The next couple of photos are of my skull beads that I make in response to the plastication of the ocean. Skulls in some societies are meant to represent wisdom and so I make skulls hoping that people will wise up to the fact that it is our plastic, yours and mine that is destroying the ocean and killing our seabirds. And that we, you and I are the ones responsible for fixing the mess,not anyone else, us.

It is down to us.

You can read more about the skull beads here

This year  has been a year of rest, of contemplation and introspection and it has been nice to not be caught up in the Christmas madness of make make make. As all working potters will know it is in the lead up to Christmas that we try to recoup our losses and the December sales are the sales that pay the bills racked up during the year. Not having the pressure of making to a schedule has given me the freedom to do things I would otherwise not have discovered I enjoy. Like Teaching.

Earlier this year The Australian Ceramics Association announced the Unearth Your Local Potter, Open Studios and so the Tasmanian Ceramics Association opened up our studio. We had demonstrations and hands on activities and I was able to indulge my theatrical side and swan about the place acting super presidential and encouraging all our visitors to get their hands dirty. It was heaps of fun. From this one day of ceramic community fun, I started to teach a class of children on Sundays at the TCA studio in Glenorchy and so Clay Club was born.

This dragon is from eight year old Ruby, I am so annoyed with myself that after taking so much care to get Ruby’s dragon home safely to my studio, I broke the dragon’s leg packing the bisque. I do have a plan though and with any luck and a bit of artful glazing I can repair the break.

The next photo is a collection of work made at Clay club, mostly by 7 year old Kate. I take along coloured slip as well as suitable clay, so that the children can decorate their work on the spot. The colours look a bit washed out now as the work has been through the bisque but they will brighten up after a glaze firing.

Sometimes the parents stay at Clay Club with their younger children (as 7 year old is my starter age, if a younger child wants to attend they need to have a parent with them as their helper) and then the parents make some amazing things as well.

The elephant was made by one of the Dads. The seagull is mine. It was squeezing the blasted seagull into the kiln that broke the dragons leg.

I am going to make more seagulls this year but they probably won’t look very seagully as I am going to make dead sea birds.

Last week I started up Kim Foale Ceramics facebook page and I was blown away that I received over 200 likes in less than 24 hours. If you want to follow my ceramic journey on facebook, Kim Foale Ceramics is the place to do it.

And so to farewell Mud Colony I have given you a super condensed recap of my year. I would like to thank Adriana very much for starting up Mud Colony and connecting so many of us. As a ceramicist I work in isolation, pottering away in my studio by myself just making stuff up and blowing stuff up as I go along. A friendship group like Mud Colony is invaluable because as potters know, the heartbreak level in ceramics is very very high. It is great to have a place to go and say, hey guys guess what, I just destroyed three months worth of work in one go and all the potters will know exactly how that feels. And the flip side is to be able to say hey guess what guys I have just made this, isn’t it amazing that it actually worked.That is the joy of ceramic friendships and what Mud Colony has come to mean to me.

It seems like it was only a blink of an eye ago that I was telling you that Veronica had organised me into posting something onto the blog, every single day for November.

And you, my dear and faithful readers saw how well that went.

Giant patches of silence are good for the soul apparently.

So are flowers.

Flowers are good for my soul, the smellier the better. I swoon over a heady old fashioned Rose and Jasmine is delightful, but Daphne, oh Daphne how sweet you are.

Ever the garden optimist, I bought a Daphne in a small pot and to my surprise, it is going great guns. I had heard that Daphne was a tricky little plant to grow but it likes where I plonked it down, thinking I will find a better spot later.  I was rewarded for my accidental finding of the best spot ever, by a cluster of the tiniest smelliest white flowers and I was immediately transported to smellyplant heaven. So yay, I am successfully growing Daphne. The gardeners amongst you will be high fiving the air in front of their computers with me, BECAUSE DAPHNE.

The mid winter devastation in my kitchen garden wreaked by a hungry wallaby, has been repaired with a riotous rush of spring growth and colour. An ornamental fence, that I knew was little more than a psychological barrier, as well as a zappy hot wire has helped to keep the voracious wallabies at bay. Plus the grass in the yard is growing faster than the wallabies can eat it so a plentiful food supply temporarily keeps them away from my flowers.

I favour the Potager style of garden and so I have red poppies in with tomatoes, in with sage and oriental lilies squeezed in with Japanese iris, rocket, kale and pansies. The basil is in a pot next to the pink lavender and the mountain strawberries are inching towards the silver foliage of a small curry plant. Feverfew and lemon thyme, purple sage and a creeping prostrate rosemary are happily cohabiting and the garden is a riotous wash of jumbled up colour that pleases me greatly.

I generally let all my plants go to seed and then watch as they pop up in the strangest of spots, the following year. This year I am particularly taken with the structure and design of the rocket’s flowers. The patterning on the petals remind me of dragonfly wings and it is these small things that make me happy.

And the native bees seem to find the rocket flowers particularly appealing. I must remember to research what colour flowers the native bees like best and plant more of those.

 It has been a late season with a very slow wakening into spring, the honey bees are finally out and about, though their numbers seem to be lower than normal. I should be seeing fruit on the raspberry canes by now and eagerly anticipating Christmas raspberries but I think the raspberries wont ripen until mid to late January. So fingers crossed we don’t get searing heat that burns them all to buggery.

 I have been walking, sporadically and I managed to clock up ten kilometres of dedicated walking in November. The camera in my phone is playing up and so the photos were a bit ordinary and are languishing in a folder until I decide to delete them or edit them.

Harry as ever is my shadow and when he isn’t asleep with his head on my foot, or underneath the table in the studio I can find him snoozing in the sunshine.

Life trundles on, the garden is growing, there are pots to fire and plans to make. David is getting better, the grandchildren are getting cranky as the anticipation of Christmas heightens their natural exuberance. The Spouse continues to be all Spousey and I am the same as I always am, EASILY DISTRACTED.

All at the same time.

I discovered Laurie Anderson in 1983 when I was struggling to define who I was. I remember the discovery of her music as a high point in an otherwise shitty year. My father had been killed in a car accident three years previously, in September 1980. In hindsight I can see that the death of my father defined the next twenty years of my life.

Seventeen is such a nothing age to be, an in between age to be, an age to grow out of.

My son is nineteen and he is struggling and so I am struggling along with him.

He is as deep and as secret as I am. He and I offer up glimpses of ourselves, sparkly shiny glimpses then we shut down. We snatch those glimpses away and we hold them tight and we pretend that everything is okay.

When really nothing is okay. Everything is okay and nothing is okay and we are walking and falling at the same time.

We show our shiny surface to the world knowing that most people will never see past the reflections and we encourage that ignorance because really, what is the point?

I drive furiously into the city to answer his call to, “come and get me please mum,” I stop at the drive through to buy an ice cream because I know that I am too tired to be driving and the sugar will help.

I photograph the cars all lined up behind me and think, this is a metaphor, this is the real truth. This is who we have become.

Our Prime Minister publicly leers at a woman’s breasts and leads us on a path that I do not want to follow, that I refuse to follow.

I despair.

"Eye contact" Abbott. pic.twitter.com/GDShNdRPiL

— Jonathan Green (@GreenJ) November 13, 2013

What is this Australia I am living in? Who are these Australian people that loudly clamour for the most vulnerable people to be locked away.

And as I despair, The Anglican Parish of Gosford gives me hope.

Father Rod with his simple call for compassion gives me hope. I need hope, I need to believe that people are basically good otherwise what is the point?

I ask you what is the point? If we have become so cruel and so self interested that instead of helping people who come begging for assistance we lock them away and demonise them in order to, in order to what?

To allay our guilt? To hide them away so that we can continue on buying all the things and eating all the drivethrough icecreams as the planet burns?

We kick those weaker than ourselves into the gutter rather than bending down and helping them up.

The government uses clever language to trick the populace into following along with their Pacific Solution and I remind you that the Pacific Solution is wrong.

It is only a short sidestep from the Pacific Solution to a Final Solution

The language is wrong.

My words feel useless and I know that I am walking and falling at the same time.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
****

Lt Colonel John McCrae. 3 May 1915

It has been raining fairly steadily for the past couple of days, a nice drenching rain that is good for the garden. But a nice drenching rain is only nice if you do not have to sit in it and become equally drenched.

There was a wallaby in my yard this morning, she was quite soggy and was busily eating grass in the open. It is unusual to see a wallaby in the daytime as they hide in amongst  the bracken and wattles and only come out into the open of an night time.  On my walks the only indicator that the wallabies are in the bush just off the side of the dirt road, is the sound of a loud warning, thump thump thump from the buck as he stamps his foot on the ground signalling danger. Then softer thumps as the family hops deeper into the bush away from the deadly human. I always try and send them a telepathic message that I am safe and to not waste their energy hopping too far away as I am only passing through.

I nearly snuck out onto the balcony  to take a better photo but I decided against it as I thought she had probably been sheltering under a stump all night.  I knew that I would spook her and scare her away from her grazing. So I stayed inside and watched her through my grubby windows for a further five minutes or so until my coffee had brewed.

This is a photo of the same wallaby I took last summer.

I have not been for a walk since Tuesday evening because of all the running around to radiology and what not. I do park as far away from things as I can, but I am not sure a 50 metre stroll across a suburban carpark counts as proper walking, but moving is moving.

The  CT scans of The Spouse’s lungs were clear and there is no evidence of any malignancy.

And I am able to think clearly again without the terrible vice grip of fear holding me hostage.

David is another matter entirely, my son is struggling a bit and he is home again for the moment, cluttering up my couch and taking over my television. Lucky for me I do not watch television or sit on the couch so I am thankful for small mercies.

The rain has eased and so I will take my chances now and head off for a quick walk.

On Sunday after a fabulous day out making clay creatures up at Oatlands, The Spouse told me that he had been coughing up blood.

For a MONTH.

We received the initial all clear last night after our GP told us The Spouse’s lung Xrays did not show any obvious signs of cancer. Today, The Spouse will have a CT scan to look for nodules (pre-cancerous growths) but our GP is treating the CT scan as a routine follow up and so I am not stressing about it as much as I was stressing about the Xrays.

I have all these words internet, so many words for my fear and my relief but as soon as I try and grab them they wriggle away and I find myself staring out the windows daydreaming.

The Spouses health is fragile but at least it isn’t lung cancer, I really do not think I could go through that again. David’s mental health is fragile but at least he is alive and the great weight of fear that was crushing me, has lifted.

I am about to go for a walk in the rain as I missed my walk yesterday.

Here is a photo from Tuesday’s walk of doom. The blue of the sky is pretty and the swirl of the clouds behind the tree were following the same lines as the dead branches. A tracery of death and vapour.