hestia school pottery
store: lighting
other functional ware
projects
about
shipping and delivery
contact
Serpent mind, symbol body
december 1, 2024
34°05’19.1”N, 118°11’40.7”W
This is the first show of lighting by hestia school pottery. The school is an idea meant to explore how we can change and deepen our ways of being, through studying ecosystems and body-mind-nature relationships. Right now it consists of a library, some writings online, workshops, and this ceramic practice. The forms you see in this show first came to me in a series of dreams, and then as I built them in waking life I’d have more dreams about light, the characters, the shapes. The interplay became a dialogue with my unconscious, guiding the course of the pieces. Serpent mind is from a Roderick Peters paper called “The Eagle and the Serpent”. It describes our instinctual thoughts and actions, the more ancient earth tether to being human, as in opposition to ‘Eagle mind’ which looks, calculating, from a distance, analyzing, weighing, thinking. So, ‘serpent mind - symbol body’ is a way of being, as a channel, inhabiting a body with its cellular knowledge of all time; embracing a movement or action you make and do not know why; digging deep, to be of the earth rather than separate from it.
The lamps demonstrate this idea, either glazed in black or as raw brown clay, representing something dug up, like a gourd, something that carries an idea of non-human time within its shape. The shades are made with hand tools in walnut or pine, with either naturally dyed Peruvian sheep wool, or transparent paper and woven weeds. The grasses are invasives, taken from up near the Hahamongna watershed park area, named in 1993 for the indigenous Tongva group that gathered and farmed there for thousands of years. The grass in the shades is meant to explore how to create in a reciprocal way, through clearing dry brush from a fire-prone area; and also how to literally reframe a plant seen as intrusive and unwanted. Through gathering I became aware of how easily I could accidentally spread these seeds by just walking, the plant part of an unseen web of competition for air, sun, and water.
h.s.p., december 2024photos by herald martin