In Grade Three, sitting in the school gymnasium, I watched “The Story of Peter and the Potter”  [NFB [1953]. The film showcased the pioneer New Brunswick potters Erica and Kjeld Deichmann. I was enthralled as lumps of mud were transformed into beautiful shapes through a series of seemingly magical processes. As the story progressed I could see that this family of potters lived and worked seamlessly in one place. It made sense.

I read Bernard Leach's A Potter's Book while taking pottery classes as a teenager. It reinforced this notion of an integrated personal and working life. In my early 20s I spent six years working in a self-directed ceramic apprenticeship, intentionally isolating myself from schools and outside influences. I enrolled in the Vancouver School of Art in 1979. At least one teacher suggested that I would have to choose either a family or an art career. It was an infuriating and typical statement of its time, challenging my resolve for an integrated life as witnessed and still fondly recollected in the little NFB film.

The ceramic practice is akin to living with an extended family, peopled by complex and diverse processes, and crowded by unruly characteristics. Clay in itself has life-like attributes; its humid flesh is always changing under your hands as it slowly hardens, finishing in a trial by fire. The multiple processes and mutable nature of clay evoke a responsive relationship - of anticipation and reaction. The material [its characteristics] and my intention to create an integrated life, all connect with my innate drive - to be a maker, and that included making a family. During the childhood and teenage years of my family I snatched hours of work during naps, school hours, and long nights. As it turned out both endeavours responded to and transformed each other.

The clay material serves to illustrate my notions - notions translated as figures, animals, landscapes, cityscapes, dioramas and pots. I return to these images recurrently rather than in series, cycling them through my own changing life-filter. I make extensive use of the surface for colour and imagery, to make some thing that delights sight and touch - why else use such a sumptuous medium. With a lateral, sidewise glance, I seek a material solution for that what is not easily expressed, in a tacit place between word and recollection.



Debra Sloan describes her new work in A Dogged Process, CeramicsTECHNICAL, No. 27, 2008