Clay Koans
The transformation of base matter into gold. The everyday into the eternal. Life, made shinier. By the logic of alchemy, this is what we are all seeking.
Prometheus – tied to his rock, staying with the pain, would argue otherwise. Clay is his medium, the mundane, the present moment.
The Buddha, smiling serenely, agrees.
Agrees with the alchemist, agrees with Prometheus. Gleams beneath layers and layers of gold leaf.
For Brad Miller, the act of making is both a process of invention and the uncovering of a pre-existing form; an expression of the geometry by which we understand our universe. In this way, each of his works is a type of satori – the suddenness of knowing that the art of living might be simpler than we think. All that is required is to accept the unknown and make with what we have to hand. To add life to life.
A comparable process might be witnessed at the Phaung Daw U Pagoda on Inle Lake in Myanmar, one of many points of orientation for Miller’s practice. When pilgrims visit the pagoda, they bring a strip of gold leaf to apply to one of five gilded images of the Buddha. Over time, the relics have evolved into strange biomorphic forms – swollen golden seed pods, shapes barely remembering the Buddha within.
When he made his own pilgrimage to Inle Lake, Miller remembers being enthralled by the sight of those abstracted relics. He collected that memory, let it settle and grow. The biomorphic Buddhas were a variation on something he already knew, corresponding with the ideas and techniques he is continually turning as a ceramicist.
By playing their part in making what is worshipped, each pilgrim to the pagoda is an artist – a reversal of the European artist-genius who carves down to the statue hidden in a block of stone. Likewise, Miller tests conventional ideals of artistic invention. His pilgrimage plays hide-and-seek with perennial and collective truths – gilding the lily, covering and crafting, so that – with the suddenness of satori – the original seed might be rediscovered.
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The objects that capture our imagination contain a clue to what is already ours; who we are at root, and where we are going. As an investigation of the geometry and processes of the natural world, Miller’s career has been a constant reworking of certain archetypal patterns, including spirals, close-packing configurations, dendritic branching, and crystalline structures – all of which are fractal in nature, demonstrating unfolding symmetry at micro and macro scales.
From the cellular to the cosmic, these are the patterns we are part of, oscillating between order and chaos in cyclical rhythms of making and unmaking. Miller’s gift is an instinctive recognition of the hidden dynamics in matter; less a mystical sensibility than a craftsman’s common sense.
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Perennial truths resist preciousness, and there is a wit to Miller’s work. This is an artist who has the audacity to make counterfeit rocks from scraps of clay; the same artist who may conjure gilded platters, each concave indentation reflecting the face of the observer. Those expressions of humility, and hubris, and humanity come together in the new earthy-glitzy forms of the gold and palladium rocks – clay that has been tumbled, glazed, fired, and re-fired with a thin atomic layer of luster.
Like every new development in Miller’s work, the idea came to him as a natural extension of his practice to date – a type of dendritic network that can be traced back to a few single seeds. In his studio in Venice, CA, early and recent works coexist as fractals of one another; from the ceramic exercises in cell division – single spheres developing into dodecahedrons – to the wooden spheroid sculptures that resemble hornets’ nests, to the pyrographic drawings and photograms of bubbles, and the still-drying porcelain platters cut with curved concavities – each indentation a section of a sphere. Outside the studio, under the lime and the mandarin trees, is a heap of ceramic objects that Miller refers to as the “bone yard” – forms like zygotes, seed pods, phalli, vertebrae, all knuckled together and growing.
The visual novelty and unexpected turns of Miller’s work are evidence of a mature artist’s acceptance of the “nothing new.” His geometric preoccupations were shared by the Shang Dynasty Chinese artisans casting ritual bronzes, and the Inuit stoneworkers carving animist vessels – both traditions that shaped his imagination as child growing up in the Pacific Northwest. On a shelf in his studio, alongside a tray of ceramic cells that he produced as a graduate student, is the first work he made at the age of 5: an ashtray for his father, the mark of a child’s thumb squidging a sphere into a dish. The ashtray serves as a reminder of the raw and spontaneous, not quite forgotten beneath the rigor and ascetic precision of the intervening decades.
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Among Miller’s sources of inspiration are the scientific illustrations that appear in D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s Of Growth and Form (1917) and Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (Art Forms in Nature) (1904). As an artist-scientist in his own right, Miller starts from an idea or a theory and develops the technology accordingly, typically working through a rigorous process of accretion and reduction. The serenity and poise of the shallow platters and bowls arise through an intensive process of carving, repeated glaze firing, grinding, and polishing, progressively working the surface to mimic the ovoid patterns of multiplication manifested by seeds, atoms, and bubbles.
As a geometrical solution for efficient use of space, the process of spherical close-packing is inherently economical; a quality seemingly subverted by the new metallic lustered bowls and platters. However, for all their apparent extravagance, these recent works represent a new simplicity of process; once removed from the kiln, the vessels undergo a final stage of refiring with luster.
This turn towards a greater immediacy of technique and intensity of presence is even more apparent in the large black and white pots, produced at a scale unprecedented in Miller’s oeuvre. While the gold and palladium works are subsumed by color and surface, these vessels are expressions of pure form. A basic black or white rough glaze serves to foreground their sculptural quality, indicative of the physical heft required to make vessels of this size and formal complexity. Miller builds the pots by hand, adding layer upon layer and shaping the dynamic surfaces by pushing and pinching from the inside out; the form is further refined by extensive carving, the glaze applied, and the pots emerge from the kiln complete.
These large vessels are more turbulent and anarchic than anything Miller has yet produced, perhaps reflecting the recent grief that has marked the artist’s life and his own necessary reconciliation with death. Miller, however, is more inclined to view the works as organic outgrowths of a dendritic network, simultaneous with all that surrounds him in the studio. Upending a pot with his full strength, he reveals that the pattern of the base corresponds to the shape of the ceramic cell division exercises produced over five decades ago. The ovoid protrusions of a neighboring pot might be read as a three-dimensional impression of wave formations, and the lattice texture of another can be compared to the structures revealed by the bubble photograms. The top-heavy dimensions of the pots share a tendency with his bisymmetical drawings, the platters, and the bowls; an expansion upwards that is both a trajectory of growth, and a working toward a close.
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There is a temptation to understand an artist’s life and work as a linear sequence, but Miller invites us to interpret the world through more complex geometries; a framing in which all forms are on their way to becoming something else. When teaching, he proposes that different ceramic vessels represent changing states of matter: from the plate or bowl designed to hold solids, to the bottle or vase for liquids, to the closed form – like a Miller rock – that describes the air around it. That closing might equally unfold to an opening, as part of a process that engenders beauty by constantly enriching a patterning of diversity.
That is what it is like to be at home with Miller’s work – to find those new geometries fitting to everyday life, subtly shaping evolving states of mind. When the studio doors are open on warm afternoons, the momentum and productivity of the workspace is no less important than the slow ripening of the limes and the mandarins, following their own elliptical asymmetries. When Miller is in need of a quick-fix creation, he picks up a multiplex bubble maker – kept handy under the bougainvillea by the porch – and fills the yard with natural artworks.
If art is inherent in the world around us, why pursue a painstaking practice of lifelong craftsmanship? It is perhaps Miller’s appreciation of evolving patterns and self-similarity in nature that saves him from the anxiety of knowing that he will never be able to draw a perfect circle. His art is a way of participation, an extension of the process of making and transformation at all scales; the artist works into those rhythms, experimenting with earthly phenomena and seeing what is received. Not all of us apply ourselves with clay or paint, but perception alone is participation and art. Each of us – like a platter, a bowl, or an urn – is an expression and a temporary vessel of awareness.
And so the alchemist will continue to feed his refining flame and seek for gold, and we will urgently strive to master the art of life in the time that is left. Living in the presence of Miller’s objects, with their sacramental gravitas and earthy humor, we might also be afforded a glinty irony, a gilded glimmer – a promise that the full accomplishment is already with us. That we might love our base matter, and make with our clay, and take each day’s invitation to transformation.
For Miller, this has become a way of life – a means of retaining equanimity in the midst of change, applying himself with industry, purpose, and unceasing investigation of the natural world. Through this process, his practice continues to yield new forms; we receive the final expressions, bearing the marks of rupture, reconnection, and the chemistry of creation.
You can learn more about Brad Miller’s work here.