[gentle music]
- One of the things that's so attractive about clay
is the sense of collaboration.
The material's very plastic and responsive.
You have to be aware and watching
as you're making because you may have an idea
about what you think you're making,
and the clay is busy making something better.
The slab is my foundational beginning element component
to everything.
I've always worked with slabs.
It just seems to be the quickest way
that I can develop a form.
I've got this slab roller here,
which allows me to generate a lot of slabs fairly quickly.
And because my object can be fairly complicated
in their construction, I really rely on the consistency
and the compression that this slab roller will provide.
I'm gonna approximate this barn form,
which is going to go on the edge of the bowl itself.
I don't really have a design in mind.
I don't measure; I'm relying on the fact
that I'm gonna get something that is somewhat ramshackle
in its look, 'cause I'm looking for that.
I never think of myself as a master craftsman.
I don't, I don't.
I think of, I'm always in the process of learning.
Every time I make something, I have to learn how to make it.
The clay is gonna help you.
It's collaborating.
So it's always a kind of a discovery for me,
and for that reason, it's a delight when it turns out.
[laughs] You know, "Ooh, that worked."
[gentle music]
The house, which is around 1870,
was the first house that I ever owned,
and I created this garden over about 20 years now.
At first, I started very timidly,
but as I became more aware of the possibility
of what I could do with this property,
learning about my own family's history as gardeners,
I was able to begin to develop it and then to just use this,
for me as an artist, as a second studio.
This will be a completely different textural presentation
in about a month.
This garden gives me a lot of satisfaction.
Of course, it contributes so much to my art as well.
It's always been inspiration.
My grandmother, Indiana Hudson, raised seven children,
and she had a beautiful garden, apparently so beautiful,
it was kind of a famous garden.
I went and I found it.
It's on a hill in Pittsburgh,
and the view down to the Monongahela River
with all the steel mills is the same.
So I could stand in Indiana's garden,
what was her garden, and see what she saw.
So that made me think, "Well, who else?
Where are they?"
I started my series called Places of Our Own
around the book African-American Gardens And Yards.
It had these very detailed maps of all of these gardens,
which I interpreted in terms of sculpture.
That made me know I needed to go
and see these places to go find the roots.
The Southern African-American Organic Farmer's Network
sent me a list of farmers
that I could contact and visit them.
And so that's what I did.
[gentle music]
The farmers were very, very eager
to talk and tell their stories
and talk about the dilemmas and the struggles.
There was Jim Crow and all that entailed,
the degradation of it, the limitations of it,
just the outright racism of it.
So there are lots of that.
And then the delight, there was always delight
about coming back or family members
or what they were able to do.
Lots and lots of good stories about being on the land
and being grateful for having their land.
I did the second series, More Places of Our Own
with the steel pedestals.
And then the Farm Bowls.
[gentle music]
A bowl is this receptacle, it's this vessel.
It opens out, it doesn't close in,
it reveals, it doesn't obscure.
And so it becomes a canvas, a page.
The roundness of it, the circular configuration of it.
You have to move.
You don't know it from all sides.
It's always changing.
I name the bowls in terms
of the farmers and gardeners who have stayed on their land
when the goal was to get them off their land.
I'm talking about courage, I'm talking about tenacity.
I'm talking about legacy.
I don't have a prescriptive way of working.
I know what the bowls are about.
I know that there are component elements
that are a visual vocabulary that include earth textures,
plant textures, things that are evocative
of the farms that they are calling attention to.
This idea of having this barn door
that passes through is not only architecturally descriptive,
but it's also metaphorical.
I'm working on a narrative that I want to make accessible
to an audience.
So I like there to be this almost musical, literary,
scientific, botanical,
all kinds of stuff that folks from different backgrounds
and different experiences can bring to this
when they visit this bowl,
which is also a place, which is also evocative of a person.
So you can find all of those layers
if you're looking for that.
As an artist, you're composing,
so I give myself license to improvise.
And I can try stuff and now if one fails, eh.
I can be disappointed and have glorious failures.
And I encourage my students to have glorious failures
because I know they tried something, they tried it,
and that's how we move forward.
[gentle music]
- Student: I'm wondering if, like, now,
since these are a little bit wonky anyways,
might be, like, a good time to, like, try some leaning
or, like, you know, do stuff like that.
- My students constantly ask me, "Is it okay if I do this?"
Well, why wouldn't it be okay?
But they're afraid
that it somehow could defy some law of art.
And so we have to go through their preconceived notions
of what something has to be to be good.
Because generally, it's not anything
that they themselves have decided upon.
It's usually someone else's standard.
And so it's not only about learning to look at objects
and things and view them on their own terms, but also,
I think it goes deeper into their own set of values.
- This one, I really don't know how I'm gonna glaze yet.
Yeah, still up for debate.
Maybe that's something we can talk about.
- Just try as much possible solutions as you can.
- Okay. -And not worry about...
- The outcome as much? - The outcome as much.
You could listen to me and I can tell you,
"Oh, I think that should have that on it."
- Right.
- But that's not doing you any good.
If they finish those projects, great.
But if they don't, that's fine.
Because I am thinking about their journey.
Most of them are not going to be artists
and potters and designers.
They're going to be people out in the world, hopefully,
thinking critically about the built environment
and what do you surround yourself with and why.
You allow yourself to trust your instincts and to question,
and so that is something that art teaches.
[gentle music]
This is Laurie Mason.
She's in Douglasville, Georgia.
This series, the intention of it
is to be out in the open, to be outside.
So hence the steel and the clay.
So the base is the roots, stem, flower.
When all of these are together, they form a garden of their own.
When I think about these farmers and gardeners
and knowing the difficulties for a family farm,
I think of them as doing a heroic thing.
These ordinary people who stayed on their land
and created a foundation for people to grow.
That's important.
[gentle music]