Although trained as a painter, I work in clay. I throw thin porcelain cups and bowls… I also work with clay slabs or on large thrown plates using metal oxides, engobes, and earth minerals as a painter might. Clay is my canvas.
Tony Prieto, teaching in the ceramic department at Mills College, encouraged me to continue in ceramics, but I took a degree in painting before spending a year in ceramics at the Kunsthaandvaerkerskolen in Copenhagen and at the Sommer Akademie for Art (painting) in Salzburg under Oskar Kokoschka.
In the ‘60s I traveled for two years, hitchhiking, with my potter husband visiting potteries in Japan and other Asian countries.
At the SF Art Institute I continued painting and drawing. Then settling in Marin County, I made a pottery studio and began using porcelain.
Invited to set up a ceramics course in Etruria, Italy, I discovered the Maremma cattle, Roman and Etruscan ceramics, and painted faces in tombs and on pottery.
Oxides dripping over rims, colors shadowing under an earlier color, glaze cascading down walls…
the act of throwing, the soft porcelain rising between my fingers, thin and wavering walls… knowing the moment to stop.
Often I draw or paint into my work.
The Italian Maremma cattle and horses, the Northwest salmon… I draw these animals… they give me a pure kind of pleasure by being in their presence. Their spirit seems to rise up inside of me joining my own… and I try to transfer this onto paper or clay.
I like simple, classical, sometimes archaic, often thin shapes… multiple firings, redrawing between layers of glaze, experimenting with color, and playing with line. My guides are past teachers, my travels, history, the sense of place, sensuous and mysterious beauty, animal presences, and my own ideas within.
Mardi Wood
August 2011