Strange Familiar

Karma would not stop jumping on me. Her bright, blue eyes implored me as her tongue flickered toward my face and her long skinny legs reached for my shoulders.

“She’s a new dog,” Donna Webb said, trying to get Karma to stay down and behave. I was passing her studio and noticed the door propped open, a rather rare occurrence, so I seized the moment and walked in.

I was sweaty from my walk in the humid heat, but the un-airconditioned studio was just slightly cooler than the street. A box fan atop an old school desk moved warm air through the dusty room filled with colorful ceramics.

As Donna and I chatted, Karma eventually turned her interest to a plastic bottle that needed a good chewing.

I introduced myself to Donna, referencing the magazine I work for and our intern who had recently interviewed her for the upcoming arts issue. She spoke freely about her latest project, “Strange Particles,” which seemed to be everywhere in the studio: layered in boxes on the now-empty display window sill, mounted on the main wall that separates the front half of the entire space from the back half, glued to the tops of three large white rectangles that look like museum podiums, strewn across white cardboard on a massive wooden shelf anchored to the outside wall of the room as a kind of work bench. The series of collage-like ceramic groupings are wired together in various combinations to resemble the chemical makeup of molecules, specifically water molecules.

As she talked about her work – the challenges of making clay into uniform pieces, the percentage of shrinkage expected during the firing process, the possibilities for connecting, stacking, arranging and displaying the variously sized saucer- and bowl-like objects that comprise the groupings – I got a sense that the project had outgrown her original vision.

Two pieces that caught my eye in particular are collaborations with her husband, Joseph. They are larger than life-sized busts of John Brown and Sojourner Truth, hollow and with the tops of their heads open. Metal rods protrude from inside the heads with Donna’s colorful discs attached to them. The effect is a cartoon-like representation of ideation.

I have walked by this studio at least twice every week since I moved to Highland Square, but this is the first time I actually walked inside it. It’s bigger than it appears from outside, despite the eclectic mix of clay and ceramic artwork filling every possible vertical and horizontal surface in the place. And maybe because of the lingering heat, the air in the studio seemed a little charged with energy – either Donna’s, Karma’s or the artwork’s. It was hard to pinpoint a source, but the electricity was palpable.

Maybe it was the way Donna so effortlessly waxed into discussing the technical and logistical challenges of her work. It was as if we had been having this conversation some time ago, got interrupted and were merely picking up where we had left off. I am a total stranger, yet she easily conveyed the warmth of an old friend. Maybe that’s a byproduct of teaching, that easy familiarity of engaging in a common cause.

Maybe it was just me. 

Whatever the cause, I left Karma staring after me through the screen door and walked the rest of the way home with a silly grin on my face, jazzed from this spontaneous moment of connection.

I have long admired Donna’s husband’s sculptures of deranged Santas, leering devils and eerily life-like animals. His crudely formed figures with evidence of fingerprints and tool marks baked into the clay overshadowed much of Donna’s work.

In contrast, the finely wrought discs and bowls and bulbs that form her Strange Particles struck me as inherently elegant and refined. She chose delicate colors as well – pale blue, soft pink, gray and a few splashes of purple or green. Between the fragile-looking ceramics and the thin wires holding them together, the compositions seemed to represent a primordial version of life rising from the muck: the nascent attempt to venture from swirling chaos into a more ordered and focused kind of existence.

Of course, I am sure I had that impression because that’s where my own life is right now. As I try to find a balance between the order and chaos in my own mind, I seek a combination of disciplined routine and spontaneity. Sometimes it feels like everything is spinning out of control, like unbalanced clay on a potter’s wheel. Other times I sense the beginning of flow – that wonderful moment when you simply allow yourself to be and everything falls into place around you. It is fleeting and rare, but once in a while it’s there.

Like when I stepped into Blue Sky Ceramics and embraced Karma.