What is in a cup? [still writing]
An essay about a single cup,stoneware, a touchstone, vessel, works with coffee, tea, jelly beans. 

I have been using a cup that I made in Thailand since 1988. This is an essay about the areas in my life it touchs, the thoughts that are tangent to its exterior, its place in my life. 

I suppose that this starts in about 1972 when I first signed up for ceramics classes in High  School. 
I walked into school as 11th grade was about to start and got in a line. At the head of the line I was given my schedule. I had selected classes as the previous year was ending. These included Electronics, Choir, Trigonometry, I am not sure what else. I was given the schedule and looked at it. I told the teacher behind the desk, ” I can’t take this Trigonometry class”. We went back and forth with him telling me that he could not change it, getting mad when I insisted. Then I let him know that the teacher was my mother. He said, Come back here, lets see what we can do. I remember that the schedule after changing the Trigonometry class was really limited. I needed a different class for 7th hour. I tried Metals shop, Drafting, Hebrew language, Physics, Photo, probably others. There was something left called Ceramics. I think that I had to ask what it was. That is how I got started. 
We did some American Raku firing during the class. When you do this you get surfaces that are outside your direct control. They have an air of naturalness at times. By this time in the semester I was reading books about ceramics every week, lots of books. A few were about this technique, Raku.
Raku, at least in some ways, revolved around a Japanese aesthetic principal, Wabi Sabi.  Wabi Sabi describes an appreciation of the worn, the old, the imperfect, in some ways just nature. While I have been told that it is Zen in origin, I think the real origin is closer to Taoism.  In my first year in college I took a course from  Dr. Walter Spink who described a person who was perfectly in tune with the Tao, the nature of nature. This person walked down to the bridge over the raging flood in a rocky mountain stream, disrobed waited a few seconds and jumped in. Perfectly in tune with the Tao, he washed up a bit down stream perfectly clean and walked back up to get his clothes. He understood the way, the way of the world, and without much effort could chose just the time and place to jump in and get washed out. Images of streams and rocks are seen as symbolic of The Tao. The ideas and practice of Taoism predate the Buddhism and particularly Zen by many centuries. However, Wabi Sabi is attached with Zen. I am not an expert in either, nor a practitioner.  
Raku is really the granted title of a person who made teabowls. It then named the process and style of their making. The title is hereditary. The current holder is Raku Kichizaemon XVI. I met  Raku XV at The Archie Bray Foundation. I found it not that remarkable a time except that  I found it ironic that the slide projector we were using for his slide show caught fire. 
Making work in this genre that really does it for me is difficult. The skill and sensitivity is something I cannot quite grasp. Excellence always involves the intangible, but for teabowls it often seems further from my grasp.  I really started to appreciate the aesthetic early and in high school built a wood burning raku kiln in my backyard. 
I ended up in undergraduate school in Kansas City, Missouri at The Kansas City Art Institute. The department head there, Ken Ferguson, was enthralled by Wabi Sabi. The museum next door, The Nelson Atkins museum always had a few pieces of Japanese teaware on display. Between Fergusons interest, the pots at the Nelson and the general tone of American Studio Pottery at the time we were all sucked into the aesthetic.  
In the 1970’s there was a strong “back to nature” cultural push. The organic foods movement got a big boost. Gas crises helped create a low energy mindset. Home grown and home made, local production and consumption all had strong cultural support. Natural looking fired surfaces were a rage, and in some ways still are.

A group of potters associated with the late Warren Mackenzie who was an apprentice of Bernard Leach taught at Minnesota State University and a group of potters gathered in the area. Many of them were dedicated to natural surfaces in their work and used the kiln as the creative instrument to make the surfaces. They fired with techniques now know as “atmospheric firing techniques” but not raku. Raku makes good ceremonial ware, but is not a good choice for daily use. The techniques used were wood firing, salt firing, a kind of firing called residual salt, and an offshoot of salt firing, soda firing. These techniques were used at high temperatures with non-porcelaineous clays to give the works rough natural surfaces. 

Bernard Leach worked in Japan with a potter Shoji Hamada. Along with Soetsu Yanagi they were interested in what has been translated often as Folk Craft or in Japanese, Mingei. In school, Ken Ferguson was standing behind Gail and said, “I wonder how you could combine Mingei with Minnesota. Concentrating on something else Gail said, “Minegeisota”. Clearly already having this word at hand but now having someone else to blame for it Ferguson tried to use it as a putdown to these potters. Instead of it being a putdown, they embraced it. What had been known as the Warren Mackenzie style or school of pottery making became known as The Mingeisota School. 

Prior to these names, atmospheric firing, Mingeisota, or knowing the phrase Wabi Sabi, I was already enthralled. I preferred wearing jeans until thread bare. The same is true of shirts. The use, the wear, the rips, all tell a story. The story “new” tells is a false cloak of respectability. Respectable cloths do not impact the respectability of those wearing them. You are how you look is only an “ism” an illness of an imperfect society whose focus is on trivialities rather than realities. 

But when Yanagi, Hamada and Leach talked about Mingei, they were talking about ceramics outside of schools, outside of galleries, indigeneous, humble. I do not think that they were even at the beginning talking about what they made, it was too expensive. They were talking local production for local use. 

Repair rather than replace is either the mark of people without much cash, or a sign of someone who values the natural of materials, the work of hands, the environment, or economy.  People like this have values. New clothing is an affectation. I find it hard to label its draw to some as a value. 

The affectation of the worship of the new, is in some a desire to show that they earn money. This desire is understandable as our language continually mixes up values and value or qualities with quantities. I am reminded of Lung Gaeow, an old friend in Thailand with little money or possession but a great human full of humor, compassion, and hard work. 

While in school in Kansas City we were given an opportunity to order books from Kodansha Publishing on kilns in Japan and their wares. There was one book for each pottery village, sometimes two different ones. These books was about  18 inches by 12 inches with huge high quality color photographs and cost less than $5 each. A Japanese student, Akio Takamori who the community sorely misses, picked up the books and shipped them. These books introduced us to Japanese potteries, “The Six Ancient Kilns” and many others were included in these series of about 50 books. I fell in love with Bizen and Shigaraki, although there were countless others it seemed that also held my interest. 

Bizenyaki, the Bizen potteries, fire much of their work to just the temperature that the clay starts to be vitrious, but can still maintain the orange color if protected from the flame and ash. How the kilns are stacked in Bizen became the primary decorative technique leaving some areas orange, some brown. Stacking with rice straw left markings from the alkali metals in the straw.  

In graduate school a fellow student, from Thailand showed me slide images of a pottery in NE Thailand called Dankwian. The pots were almost exclusviely 20 gallon water storage jars, wood fired, no glaze, fired to about cone 7, a lot like Bizen pots. But these had never been snarfed up as teaware. They were intended for humble use. Most pots like this were long gone in Japan. 

The graduate student, now retired Professor Poonarat Pichayapaiboon, and I took courses together. His English was spotty so as I helped him with English he taught me a bit of Thai. A few years after graduate school I heard that there was a Thai potter visiting the Archie Bray Foundation. I walked up, and in Thai said, “Hello! Where is the bathroom”. She pointed. I then asked what I though meant, ” Do you know of the village of Dankwian?” Not really meaning that she responded in English “What do you mean?”. Turns out she owned a pottery there.  This is what prompted the Thai Fulbright.