Dick Lehman

Twenty-Two Ways of Clay
A National Ceramics Invitational
Curated by Gary C. Hatcher
October 26th, 2001-January 8th, 2002
The Meadows Gallery
Cowan Fine & Performing Arts Center
The University of Texas at Tyler
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Dick Lehman - Artist Statement

I experience a kind of reverence in wood-firing that I find in no other ceramic pursuit: I stoke the kiln with wood, which has grown over the last thirty or fifty, or perhaps seventy years. During those years the tree, being true to its own biological requirements (and subject to the particularities of the roughly two hundred cubic yards of soil atop of which it sits, and through which its roots traverse), has quietly but steadily stored away in its bark and cambium layer a peculiar set of soluble minerals and metallic salts.

When the wood, which I thrust into the blazing twenty-five hundred degrees firebox fairly explodes into combustion, minuscule trace amount of these minerals and salts (which are not combustible) hitch a ride on the fly-ash and start a journey through the kiln. The ash swirls and eddies around pots, gets lifted with the heat of combustion to higher elevations within the kiln, then cooling a bit begins to descend through the pots and shelves, being inexorably pulled by the chimney's draft to a small exit flue hole at the bottom of the kiln. If by some chance of the swirling tides of flame-currents within the kiln the ash has avoided direct contact with the pots, the fly-ash exits the chimney, eventually returning to the earth to fertilize another generation of forests. But should the fly-ash, during its dance among the pots, come in direct contact with the red-hot molten sticky surface of a pot, the ash adheres, then burns away, leaving the smallest imaginable trace of flux and hitchhiking-glaze-chemistry on the surface of the pot.

After seven to fifteen days of these chance encounters, there begins to collect a formidable swell of these glaze-making traces, and soon a new kind of flow emerges: an oozing sticky mass of improbable collaborators, flowing down the side of the pots, drawn now by gravity's rule to find their way to the lowest point on the pot.

It is this unlikely blend of biology, chemistry, physics, and intentionality that leads me to a sense of reverence concerning these wood-fired forms. The arbitrary quality of the flames and the fuel sources create never-to-be-repeated surfaces, which are rich with clues, hints, and information to the inquiring eye.

I believe that one can never really MAKE wood fired pots. One can only work alongside the trees and the clay and the flames, and RECEIVE the gifts of the kiln with awe and appreciation.