We’ve had a potter in the basement for the past few days. This is the kind of thing that can happen when you live in a village devoted to arts and crafts. Every year an international festival of pottery and ceramics brings amateur and professional artists here from all over the world, and space has to be found for them to display their creations. So the visiting artists are shoehorned into courtyards, garages, spare rooms around the village, and into our basement. What we call the basement is a vaulted stone space under the house at street level, where farm animals were kept in the old days. It could be a garage if the street was wide enough to turn a car into it. But with a few tasteful electric lights strung along the roof it makes a perfectly acceptable gallery. Visitors are encouraged to take a walking tour of all these exhibits and, for a few days, the village has the air of a major tourist attraction. Then it lapses into is normal state of slightly dazed tranquility.
The festival is a display of imagination, as well and craft and technique, from traditional bowls and pots, many beautifully decorated, to funny animals and birds, and astonishing sculptural creations full of symbolism and mystery. The three dimensionality of pottery gives extra scope to the artistic imagination.
The artist we were hosting this year came from Switzerland, and presented an elegant display of ceramics, mostly white, which attracted admiring attention. When she had to leave the gallery for a while, one of us, usually my wife, had to sit with the exhibit and answer questions. This can be a delicate situation because everyone who comes into a gallery assumes that the person sitting there must be the artist, which is flattering. Even I have been mistaken for the artist on occasion, although I certainly don’t look like one. I am willing to pretend, but any such pretense would be a waste of time. I was rather hoping that having a potter in the basement might cause artistic taste and creativity to percolate upwards from under my feet and endow me with the aesthetic gifts that I lack. But it didn’t happen, perhaps because of the thickness of the stone floor.
It is fascinating to watch how visitors interact with unfamiliar art. Some simply walk in, look around and walk out without a word. Some study the exhibits in great detail as if seriously contemplating a purchase, then leave quickly. Some seize on whatever seems familiar: "Look, this is just like a teapot!" And a few want to engage the real or fake artist in a serious discussion.
Everyone wants to have some art in their lives, and pottery is popular as a creative hobby. It is enjoyably tactile and messy, which is why kids love doing it. It is practical and decorative, and it has an enormously long history –thirty thousand years at least. Pottery shards are often the first clue to an ancient settlement, so pottery may be as old as civilization.
The fact that the art of pottery is still alive and well is a sign that, in spite everything that we hear and fear, civilization is not quite yet a thing of the past. You have to take your good news where you can find it, even if you find it in the basement.
Copyright: David Bouchier
