Ceramics Without Teens

My child does not want a mom who constantly creates artistic ruckus, but a mom who models balance. He has no idea what it means to be middle-aged.

My oldest son used to tell me to stop reading, and moreso, to stop producing, science fiction. When that child first came to realize that I sometimes create poetics containing graphic descriptions of malevolent human deeds, he got edgy. My boy suggested that my impatience with things domestic and my anger with things perfunctory could be better vented through paint or crayons.

Whereas I agreed with him that I did not need to channel all of my feelings into words, I disagreed with him that I needed to substitute paper-based media for type; I’m the sort of gal who prefers to put her abstract sensibilities into clay. No translucent, nonabsorbent porcelain for me. There exist, already, sufficient, white, temperamental, brittle moments in my life with teens. My earthly articulations grow, instead, from relatively porous, soft, and cold pottery. I make organic forms.

Whereas some artists make such forms from draped slab, I hand build. Whereas other ceramicists combine shapes to create totems, I choose to invest myself in artifacts that lack apparent function. Also, I become my work.

Though I shy away from replicating exotic fruit, mundane vegetables, or arbor-borne seeds, disdaining art that is in any way “forced’ or that otherwise appears to be an contrived capitulation to something real, I do rock my socks on carving, on buffing, and on joining moist bits of nonfigurative earth to each other. I could not care less that organic forms are not always counted among the disciplines of contemporary creativity. It suffices that my clay “speak” to me.

However, it distresses my child, moreso than does my dark speculative fiction, to witness my response to my silicon-based art. When I smile or laugh, because I am pleased with the manner in which I have manipulated some dirt and sand, my teen frowns and grows silent.

I sometimes answer his intentionally curbed discourse contemptuously, explaining to my child that as a result of my work, I, myself, am becoming silicon-based, i.e. am turning into a life form with the same number of outer shell electrons as him, a carbon-based creation. To such retorts, my teen grimaces.

His nonverbal arguments, as well as his rhetoric, are meant to afflict me with a deep feeling of guilt. My child does not want a mom who constantly creates artistic ruckus, but a mom who models balance. He has no idea what it means to be middle-aged.