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Artist Exhibitions:
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Artist Statement for Susan Yvette England
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I was born in Oklahoma and grew up in Texas. My husband was a career NCO in the U.S. Army and we settled in the Columbus, GA area when he retired. We now live on a plot of land in rural Alabama. It’s wild and wooded, and we love it.
It is impossible to explain the satisfaction, joy, and comfort I feel while working with clay. Whether I am wedging (cutting clay into pieces and slapping it onto a table), throwing, trimming, or carving the clay, I feel like that is the exact place in the universe where I belong.
Ceramics was a required course for my Art degree, or I might never have taken it. As soon as I started working with the clay, I was hooked! I struggled for a few weeks trying to throw a cylinder on the electric wheel. My frustration level was increasing but that just left more determined to make it work. Someone finally suggested I try using the kick wheel instead of the electric one. When I did, my left-handed tendencies automatically had me kicking the wheel in a clockwise direction rather than the counter-clockwise direction the powered wheel was going. And, badda-bing! I threw a cylinder! I was on the road to being a real potter! I still throw pots left-handed and trim them right-handed, but that’s just me. I took other art courses, like metal smithing/jewelry making, and really enjoyed them, but always spent as much time as possible in the ceramics lab.
Now, some potters are ‘color and fire’ potters and others are ‘mud and water’ potters. The color and fire potters love to work with glazes and firing techniques for just the right finished look. Mud and water potters, like me, like working with the raw clay. I love molding, manipulating, sculpting, trimming, and all the other steps involved in making a piece from clay. Once it’s fired, I like to be sure the finish fits the piece, but the finish is not the part of the process that makes me happiest.
I am sometimes asked if there is a meaning to the lines that I cut into the clay. I usually hedge on the answer because it is difficult to explain. I call them “contour lines” or simply “my lines” for want of a better term, but I like to think they are representative of life and the passage of time. Regardless of your direction in life, things change. While some aspects are continuous, there are always intersecting phases, occurrences that change your direction, unexpected meetings that change your outlook, and truths that can transform your soul. Birth, death, love, disappointment; all are interwoven, like the lines I carve into my pots.
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