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SEQUOIA MILLER Congress Street Gallery Please click images above for full view.
I love making pottery, and feel fortunate to be a potter. I produce each piece myself from start to finish. I make many pots, and every one is individual.
Each time I make a pot I try to endow it with its own life. This life comes from an active balance of the form's tradition, its use, how I made it the previous time, memories of ones I've seen in the past, ideas I've had but never tried, etc. When I make a group of cups, I recall what I was thinking about in the last series of cups, what I liked and didn't like about them, and what I'd like to try. It's like this with all of my pots.
Some forms change quickly and others slowly, but all are in a state of fluidity. My hope as a studio potter is to make the best work I can--and to find out over time what exactly that means.
My first clay classes were as a youth with Toby Rosenberg, a potter in Portland, Maine.
I began in clay in earnest some years later, after graduating from college, when I came across Mark Shapiro, a potter in western Massachusetts. Mark encouraged me to study at Penland School in North Carolina, where before long I was there learning from Douglass Rankin & Will Ruggles.
Douglass & Will are the potters who awoke in me a meaningful way of understanding pots. They introduced me to the art and philosophy of mingei, or the Japanese folk-craft movement. They are for me a direct link to the work of Shoji Hamada, Bernard Leach, and Warren MacKenzie. Douglass and Will also introduced me to the process of wood-firing.
Since that formative experience, I have also learned from Michael Simon, Linda Christianson, Nick Joerling, MacKenzie Smith, Terry Gess and Chris Staley. I embrace the act of making as the most effective means of learning. This philosophy was passed on to me by Douglass & Will. My ideas emerge through the continuity of a daily studio practice, rather than in advance of it.
I work alone in my studio on a wooden treadle wheel, crafted by Doug Gates in North Carolina. My studio is next to my house. Behind the studio I have gas kiln where I fire nearly all of my work. I use a dark stoneware clay, and mix up traditional glazes akin to ones developed in Japan and China centuries ago.
I begin nearly every piece on my potters' wheel. Many of my pots are faceted. This is where I slice a blade or wire through an extra thick clay wall, leaving an arcing flat surface. This creates a series of planes and angles, which I find very engaging.
I also alter many wheel-thrown forms. Altering is any type of pushing or squeezing of a round pot to make a different shape. Many of my pots begin round, but end up square, six sided or flat.
I love making a wide variety of different forms: jars, teapots, and vases as well as cups and bowls. Each has a different type of complexity that engages a different part of my imagination.
Excerpted Maine Sunday Telegram review by Philip Isaacson, March 13, 2005
I greet the news that there are multiple universes with
applause. If there are enough of them, one among them should
surely embrace a point at which all good and simple things are
joined. In that universe, Shaker boxes with their exquisitely
conceived fingers, Danish chairs of a half-century ago that
bring the balance between the character of wood and its
acquiescence to form to a point in which they reach
universals, and small pots achieved in Korea 400 years ago
would be bathed in a golden light.
I cannot offer you golden light in our current universe, but I
can suggest a way of establishing what such light may be like.
It involves a trip to the June Fitzpatrick Gallery Congress
Street location and an easy surrender to the pleasure of its
current exhibition. The event is called "Two American Potters"
and offers current work by Warren MacKenzie and Sequoia
Miller. Mr. MacKenzie is the preeminent American studio
potter. He is a legend in his own time for commitment,
integrity and a maker of small pots that touch your heart.
Availability is the ethos--the root--of the studio potter
and both MacKenzie and Miller are staunch adherents to the
creed. Each produces objects that are at once modest,
dignified, harmonious and, in every case, intended for use.
Neither would accept the term fine arts potter (or ceramic
artist or some similar title) although both are creators of
forms that reflect wondrous moments in art. The simplicity,
the visual and functional integrity, the urgings to use
embodied in their work are so exquisitely compounded that they
warm the place in which you store your aesthetics. The
emotional bond between the potter and the user is so direct
and on so primal a level that MacKenzie's and Miller's pots
become an extension of the user's persona. They become a part
of your life without intimidation. This does not imply that I
use my examples of their work with relaxation. I don't.
I grant them the greatest respect and consider myself the
recipient of their makers' generosity. Wide use is fundamental
to the concept of the studio potter and that implies modest
charges. Those who have attended past shows of Miller's work
at the Fitzpatrick will understand this. The prices dictated
by MacKenzie and Miller are so far below what a gallery show
normally implies, that the work is broadly affordable. But
supply never meets demand and this contributes a wistful
quality to ownership. You're encouraged to use the work, but
if you break it you probably can't replace it, so use it
carefully.
Both artists work from the wheel, although Miller, at times,
can belie that point. In fact, for some time I thought that
many of his pieces were built from small slabs.
MacKenzie's pots speak with utter authority. Their pedigree is
immaculate--the Korean Yi Dynasty, Shoji Hamada and the
Japanese Craft Movement and the legendary British potter,
Bernard Leach--and is beyond duplication. He is our remaining
touch with the first half of the 20th century. The fact that
he is still producing and that his work is increasingly
intense is one of nature's rare grace notes. To touch his
pieces in this show is to touch Hamada and Leach while, in
their own right, to touch objects made wonderful through a
reduction to emotional essentials, a process achieved with
certainty and conviction. His work comes to us as a
benediction.
Sequoia Miller is the more vivacious of the two. He holds to
the prescriptions of order and utility while contributing his
personal gift of animation. At times his pots touch on
Modernism. Those that do are strictly constructed, have little
memory of the wheel and embrace abstraction. Miller's pieces
are rarely at rest, and when light dances near them, they
dance with it. There is a sense of anticipation about Miller's
work that is irresistible.
Congress Street Gallery
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