Roswell Art Center West (affectionately known as
“Clay West”) is a rare sort of place: a community-based ceramics center that
attracts and fosters passionate, ambitious, dedicated artists. There’s an energy about the place that
has less to do with dabbling contentedly in a hobby than it does with fiercely
pursuing a vision, doggedly building skill, and being part of a community of
equally driven and impassioned artists. Fresh out of grad school, I stumbled –
first, into a residency, and then, into a teaching gig – here starting in the
fall of 2011. Teaching here and being a part of this community has taught me
lessons that grad school could not.
Students at Clay West span the decades between
age 16 and age 83, and boast backgrounds as varied as BFA, MFA, and MBA degrees,
former lawyer, current doula, accomplished exhibiting artist, no prior artistic
experience, Russian immigrant, mother, father, retired art teacher. Anyone
entering this world, particularly if you’ve recently exited from the world of
art academia, will be astonished by the absence of hierarchy. Here, students
do not judge one another based on what degrees or years of training they boast;
instead, people are known by the work they make, the technical challenges they
take on, the questions they ask of and feedback they offer to each other. It is a
remarkably fluid culture in which one person’s creative success enriches the
collective, one in which students freely take inspiration from one another’s
creative growth.
Sudha fell at the far end of Clay West’s age
spectrum. In her early 70’s, this full-time grandma, who collected her
grandchildren every afternoon from school and kept them till evening, was at
first glance a sweet, harmless, dawdling older lady merely looking for some artsy
fun in her golden years. The first thing I learned about Sudha – by her own
giddy admission – was that her memory was failing. I’d hear her asking other
instructors technical questions about ceramic building or surface techniques,
followed immediately, in her melodic Indian accent, by, “The trouble is, I
forget everything…”, then, in lower
tones, “I’ll probably have to ask you again…” – a fact she’d shrug off with a
lighthearted giggle.
Over half a year went by before I had the chance
to work with Sudha. She approached me before signing up for my class in order to
describe her vision for her next project, and to ask me if I thought I could
help her realize it. I thought it sounded awfully ambitious – particularly for
a 70-something woman with a limited background in ceramic building techniques,
but I was game if she was – and Sudha was always
game.
A native of India who came to the U.S. for
graduate school in the 70’s, met her husband – also an Indian native – there,
and stayed on in the States to raise a family and to work as an educator, Sudha
drew great inspiration from her cultural and spiritual heritage. While she had
been raised a Jainist (an essentially nontheistic Indian spiritual tradition
that regards nonviolence and concern for the welfare of all as the highest
virtues), her husband was Hindu, and Sudha had grown to incorporate Hinduism’s
devotional traditions like burning butter candles and floating flowers in water
as offerings to a colorful pantheon of gods. I think Sudha had a sort of
aesthetic love affair with the Hindu tradition: she was drawn to its
multisensory nature (smells, textures, vivid colors), its ornate imagery, and
its wonderful characters, so rich in
symbolism.
Sudha was particularly fond of the elephant,
inspired by Hindu god Ganesha, known as the god of auspiciousness or “Lord of
Success”, destroyer of evil and obstacles, and associated with education and
abundance. Sudha herself bore so much gentleness and good will toward everyone
that I think she identified with Ganesha’s benevolent aspects, and saw creating
ceramic elephants as incarnating more of Ganesha’s auspiciousness and
benevolence in the world, for the good of all. She was magnanimous like this,
though she’d have you believe – in her polka-dotted and collared sea-foam-blue
smock, with her ambling, seemingly absent-minded stroll and her forgetful
questions – that she was just a harmless old woman mucking about in clay for the
heck of it.
The last big project Sudha and I worked on
together was a tiered structure with the body of a majestic, peacock-like bird
at its base. A sort of spire rose from the bird’s back, to which three
cylindrical troughs of diminishing width were attached. Sudha’s initial hope was
to finish the piece in time for Diwali, the Indian “festival of lights”. She
intended to fill tiny saucers on these tiered troughs with ghee, a sacred
substance consisting of clarified butter and used as lamp oil, and to insert
home-made cotton wicks into the ghee. When lit, such wicks burn for hours. She
also intended to fill the large bed of each trough with water, and to float
fresh flowers in the water, uniting fire, water, and these vibrant, trembling
symbols of life (flowers) into one vessel. She even wanted to add platforms
upon which cone-shaped incense could be burned.
I thought this form mightily ambitious, but
respected the fire that danced in Sudha’s eyes as she spoke of her vision. We
made some drawings and she got started. Her first form began to slump and crack
irreparably after a month of hard work. I suggested ways to attempt a fix, and
expected she’d try these, that they wouldn’t be enough, and that she’d go back
to making her simpler slab-based clocks. When I came back the following Tuesday
for our weekly class together, she had already begun a new incarnation of the
bird lantern, and was excited to show me what she’d learned from the first
attempt. By the time our 8-week class had run its course, Sudha was putting the
finishing touches on this piece. At every leg of the building process, I
doubted her – never her commitment, but her ability to meet the profound
technical challenges with which her design brought her to grips. She, however,
continued to behave like water, slowly lapping away at these challenges,
bit by bit, never overly confident and
never despairing; she persisted with quiet grace.
It wasn’t until months later that I discovered her name, Sudha, means
“living water”; how appropriate, I marveled.
It took another 8-week class session for Sudha to
refine and dry the piece for firing, and again to decorate its surface. At the
beginning of the following 8-week session (now a full 2-plus sessions after
beginning this vessel), Sudha brought the finished bird lantern to class, filled
it with water, flowers, butter oil, cotton wicks, and incense, and lit it up. We
turned off the lights and smiled in awe. She looked just as pleasantly surprised
as the rest of us that she had been able to pull it off. She had built the
vessel from a very groggy red clay (grog is fired clay that looks and
feels like sand), and had honored its earthiness with a minimal surface
decoration consisting only of earthy oxides and a subtle gold finish. The form
of the peacock-like bird itself embodied Sudha’s awkward beauty – awkward only
in the sense that age had charmingly slowed her down and imparted a sort of
loveable bumblingness that became radiance in her graceful way of bearing it.
The eight or so of us present, many of whom had watched her construct this
complex form from scratch, stood there in silence, in the semi-dark, smelling
incense and burning butter, watching how the candle light illuminated Sudha’s
humble, quietly proud smile.
As the next 8-week session began, I noticed I had
not seen Sudha – usually a constant presence – around the studio. I missed her
lilting accent, which always reminded me of the dancing music of a brook.
Several weeks later, I heard word that she’d suffered a severe stroke, and that
it had left her paralyzed. Within a day of this news, came the news that, while
being diagnosed for this stroke, Sudha was found to harbor a rare and relentless
form of leukemia. Two days later came the news she had slipped
away.
It has been nearly a month, and I am still
wrapping my brain– and my heart – around the notion that Sudha is gone. She was
such a persistent, joyful force around our studio, so relaxed in her older years
and experiencing a robust creative renaissance through her work in clay. How, I
continue to wonder, does such a force simply stop
existing? This is a mystery I have yet to comprehend. And I am no
stranger to death – it was a nearly-annual experience in my own
life during my childhood and teenage years, and I grew to
anticipate that feeling of a cozy, well-worn rug being suddenly
ripped out from under one’s feet.
When people (or animals) I love die, I can’t help
but think of the first law of thermodynamics, which suggests (quoting from
Wikipedia in true scholarly fashion, to get this right), “that energy can be neither created
nor destroyed. However, energy can change forms, and energy can flow from
one place to another. The total energy of an isolated system remains the same.”
When someone so abundant in creativity, generosity, love and grace ceases in
body to exist, I empirically sense that their energy goes right on being.
How, exactly, or in what form, I cannot explain, but I imagine Sudha’s spirit,
smiling down from some cosmic plateau, continuing to radiate Ganesha-like
auspiciousness to all the people she knew and loved, and to those she didn’t
know but for whom she felt deep
compassion.
This is my tribute to her beautiful spirit and my testament to her legacy. I haven’t even
gotten around to mentioning how she’d bring me tupperwares-full of her
delicious Indian cooking once she found out I loved Indian food, or the time
she gave me a yogurt-sized container of the ochre-yellow spice turmeric because
it was her go-to folk remedy for the tendonitis I was experiencing. Even more
than these gifts, I treasure her example of deep satisfaction with the exact
shape and size of her life in the present moment. She knew how to really be
happy with what she had, how to love herself even as her memory faltered and
her body slowed down, and, at the same time, how to keep gently reaching beyond
her comfort zone, becoming capable of more than she was the day before. She met her
creative challenges with a rare equanimity and sense of humor; no matter how
inspired her vision, when technical setbacks arose or when a piece didn’t come
together as she’d hoped, she'd simply shrug, laugh that, “Oh well, it’s only
clay”, and kept right on plugging away, with joy.
Now when I scroll through the plethora of artists’ renderings of
Ganesha in a Google Image search, I see Sudha’s eyes in
those of the elephant god, see her achingly compassionate, deeply comforting
smile in his smile. I am secretly convinced that Sudha’s energy was
so great that, upon the expiration of her physical body, a new
elephant-head-shaped nebula arose somewhere deep in the
solar system, more glorious and awe-inspiring than the beloved
Horsehead Nebula. Maybe some of the starlight we all see as we crane our
necks to the night sky is being generated by Sudha’s butter candles,
their glow once again illuminating her
graceful smile out beyond where human eyes can see, but in a place that human
hearts can register.
“Clay West”) is a rare sort of place: a community-based ceramics center that
attracts and fosters passionate, ambitious, dedicated artists. There’s an energy about the place that
has less to do with dabbling contentedly in a hobby than it does with fiercely
pursuing a vision, doggedly building skill, and being part of a community of
equally driven and impassioned artists. Fresh out of grad school, I stumbled –
first, into a residency, and then, into a teaching gig – here starting in the
fall of 2011. Teaching here and being a part of this community has taught me
lessons that grad school could not.
Students at Clay West span the decades between
age 16 and age 83, and boast backgrounds as varied as BFA, MFA, and MBA degrees,
former lawyer, current doula, accomplished exhibiting artist, no prior artistic
experience, Russian immigrant, mother, father, retired art teacher. Anyone
entering this world, particularly if you’ve recently exited from the world of
art academia, will be astonished by the absence of hierarchy. Here, students
do not judge one another based on what degrees or years of training they boast;
instead, people are known by the work they make, the technical challenges they
take on, the questions they ask of and feedback they offer to each other. It is a
remarkably fluid culture in which one person’s creative success enriches the
collective, one in which students freely take inspiration from one another’s
creative growth.
Sudha fell at the far end of Clay West’s age
spectrum. In her early 70’s, this full-time grandma, who collected her
grandchildren every afternoon from school and kept them till evening, was at
first glance a sweet, harmless, dawdling older lady merely looking for some artsy
fun in her golden years. The first thing I learned about Sudha – by her own
giddy admission – was that her memory was failing. I’d hear her asking other
instructors technical questions about ceramic building or surface techniques,
followed immediately, in her melodic Indian accent, by, “The trouble is, I
forget everything…”, then, in lower
tones, “I’ll probably have to ask you again…” – a fact she’d shrug off with a
lighthearted giggle.
Over half a year went by before I had the chance
to work with Sudha. She approached me before signing up for my class in order to
describe her vision for her next project, and to ask me if I thought I could
help her realize it. I thought it sounded awfully ambitious – particularly for
a 70-something woman with a limited background in ceramic building techniques,
but I was game if she was – and Sudha was always
game.
A native of India who came to the U.S. for
graduate school in the 70’s, met her husband – also an Indian native – there,
and stayed on in the States to raise a family and to work as an educator, Sudha
drew great inspiration from her cultural and spiritual heritage. While she had
been raised a Jainist (an essentially nontheistic Indian spiritual tradition
that regards nonviolence and concern for the welfare of all as the highest
virtues), her husband was Hindu, and Sudha had grown to incorporate Hinduism’s
devotional traditions like burning butter candles and floating flowers in water
as offerings to a colorful pantheon of gods. I think Sudha had a sort of
aesthetic love affair with the Hindu tradition: she was drawn to its
multisensory nature (smells, textures, vivid colors), its ornate imagery, and
its wonderful characters, so rich in
symbolism.
Sudha was particularly fond of the elephant,
inspired by Hindu god Ganesha, known as the god of auspiciousness or “Lord of
Success”, destroyer of evil and obstacles, and associated with education and
abundance. Sudha herself bore so much gentleness and good will toward everyone
that I think she identified with Ganesha’s benevolent aspects, and saw creating
ceramic elephants as incarnating more of Ganesha’s auspiciousness and
benevolence in the world, for the good of all. She was magnanimous like this,
though she’d have you believe – in her polka-dotted and collared sea-foam-blue
smock, with her ambling, seemingly absent-minded stroll and her forgetful
questions – that she was just a harmless old woman mucking about in clay for the
heck of it.
The last big project Sudha and I worked on
together was a tiered structure with the body of a majestic, peacock-like bird
at its base. A sort of spire rose from the bird’s back, to which three
cylindrical troughs of diminishing width were attached. Sudha’s initial hope was
to finish the piece in time for Diwali, the Indian “festival of lights”. She
intended to fill tiny saucers on these tiered troughs with ghee, a sacred
substance consisting of clarified butter and used as lamp oil, and to insert
home-made cotton wicks into the ghee. When lit, such wicks burn for hours. She
also intended to fill the large bed of each trough with water, and to float
fresh flowers in the water, uniting fire, water, and these vibrant, trembling
symbols of life (flowers) into one vessel. She even wanted to add platforms
upon which cone-shaped incense could be burned.
I thought this form mightily ambitious, but
respected the fire that danced in Sudha’s eyes as she spoke of her vision. We
made some drawings and she got started. Her first form began to slump and crack
irreparably after a month of hard work. I suggested ways to attempt a fix, and
expected she’d try these, that they wouldn’t be enough, and that she’d go back
to making her simpler slab-based clocks. When I came back the following Tuesday
for our weekly class together, she had already begun a new incarnation of the
bird lantern, and was excited to show me what she’d learned from the first
attempt. By the time our 8-week class had run its course, Sudha was putting the
finishing touches on this piece. At every leg of the building process, I
doubted her – never her commitment, but her ability to meet the profound
technical challenges with which her design brought her to grips. She, however,
continued to behave like water, slowly lapping away at these challenges,
bit by bit, never overly confident and
never despairing; she persisted with quiet grace.
It wasn’t until months later that I discovered her name, Sudha, means
“living water”; how appropriate, I marveled.
It took another 8-week class session for Sudha to
refine and dry the piece for firing, and again to decorate its surface. At the
beginning of the following 8-week session (now a full 2-plus sessions after
beginning this vessel), Sudha brought the finished bird lantern to class, filled
it with water, flowers, butter oil, cotton wicks, and incense, and lit it up. We
turned off the lights and smiled in awe. She looked just as pleasantly surprised
as the rest of us that she had been able to pull it off. She had built the
vessel from a very groggy red clay (grog is fired clay that looks and
feels like sand), and had honored its earthiness with a minimal surface
decoration consisting only of earthy oxides and a subtle gold finish. The form
of the peacock-like bird itself embodied Sudha’s awkward beauty – awkward only
in the sense that age had charmingly slowed her down and imparted a sort of
loveable bumblingness that became radiance in her graceful way of bearing it.
The eight or so of us present, many of whom had watched her construct this
complex form from scratch, stood there in silence, in the semi-dark, smelling
incense and burning butter, watching how the candle light illuminated Sudha’s
humble, quietly proud smile.
As the next 8-week session began, I noticed I had
not seen Sudha – usually a constant presence – around the studio. I missed her
lilting accent, which always reminded me of the dancing music of a brook.
Several weeks later, I heard word that she’d suffered a severe stroke, and that
it had left her paralyzed. Within a day of this news, came the news that, while
being diagnosed for this stroke, Sudha was found to harbor a rare and relentless
form of leukemia. Two days later came the news she had slipped
away.
It has been nearly a month, and I am still
wrapping my brain– and my heart – around the notion that Sudha is gone. She was
such a persistent, joyful force around our studio, so relaxed in her older years
and experiencing a robust creative renaissance through her work in clay. How, I
continue to wonder, does such a force simply stop
existing? This is a mystery I have yet to comprehend. And I am no
stranger to death – it was a nearly-annual experience in my own
life during my childhood and teenage years, and I grew to
anticipate that feeling of a cozy, well-worn rug being suddenly
ripped out from under one’s feet.
When people (or animals) I love die, I can’t help
but think of the first law of thermodynamics, which suggests (quoting from
Wikipedia in true scholarly fashion, to get this right), “that energy can be neither created
nor destroyed. However, energy can change forms, and energy can flow from
one place to another. The total energy of an isolated system remains the same.”
When someone so abundant in creativity, generosity, love and grace ceases in
body to exist, I empirically sense that their energy goes right on being.
How, exactly, or in what form, I cannot explain, but I imagine Sudha’s spirit,
smiling down from some cosmic plateau, continuing to radiate Ganesha-like
auspiciousness to all the people she knew and loved, and to those she didn’t
know but for whom she felt deep
compassion.
This is my tribute to her beautiful spirit and my testament to her legacy. I haven’t even
gotten around to mentioning how she’d bring me tupperwares-full of her
delicious Indian cooking once she found out I loved Indian food, or the time
she gave me a yogurt-sized container of the ochre-yellow spice turmeric because
it was her go-to folk remedy for the tendonitis I was experiencing. Even more
than these gifts, I treasure her example of deep satisfaction with the exact
shape and size of her life in the present moment. She knew how to really be
happy with what she had, how to love herself even as her memory faltered and
her body slowed down, and, at the same time, how to keep gently reaching beyond
her comfort zone, becoming capable of more than she was the day before. She met her
creative challenges with a rare equanimity and sense of humor; no matter how
inspired her vision, when technical setbacks arose or when a piece didn’t come
together as she’d hoped, she'd simply shrug, laugh that, “Oh well, it’s only
clay”, and kept right on plugging away, with joy.
Now when I scroll through the plethora of artists’ renderings of
Ganesha in a Google Image search, I see Sudha’s eyes in
those of the elephant god, see her achingly compassionate, deeply comforting
smile in his smile. I am secretly convinced that Sudha’s energy was
so great that, upon the expiration of her physical body, a new
elephant-head-shaped nebula arose somewhere deep in the
solar system, more glorious and awe-inspiring than the beloved
Horsehead Nebula. Maybe some of the starlight we all see as we crane our
necks to the night sky is being generated by Sudha’s butter candles,
their glow once again illuminating her
graceful smile out beyond where human eyes can see, but in a place that human
hearts can register.