October 7, 2009
GraphicPower: Terry Gess Makes His Mark
with Monthly Methods: Slips Marks, by Terry Gess — including slip recipes
Blue container, 13 in. (33 cm) in height, thrown and altered white stoneware with multiple slips and glaze, salt fired to cone 10, 2009.
Over the past thirty years, Terry Gess has developed a personal logic that allows him to engage fully with the world around him. The short version of the story is this: Whole life, whole potter. The long version has to do with learning how to see, touch, and hear the nuances of daily life, then intuit a light-handed, rich response through clay. It matters that Gess plays the piano, dabbles in painting, takes creative writing classes and can tell you five Southern Appalachian ways to say, “He’s not from here.” It matters that when Gess sees an African wall hanging he hears polyrhythmic music; when he studies a piece of sheet music, he sees the patterns in black and white but understands that these flashes on the page do not come to life until they are played-in other words, until they fulfill their function.
This sort of synesthesia lends itself to a body of work whose beauty reveals its secrets slowly. Gess’ work can be seen, touched, and used in daily tasks. But his signature saturated black marks across a layered palette of earthy browns and ivories are what keep unfolding long after the mug has been washed, the plate scraped, or the vase emptied and put back on the shelf. Like a flash of pattern behind closed eyelids, these marks are intuitive and sudden. They are seen but also felt, tapping into an archetypal language across histories and cultures.
To see Gess move around in his studio is to understand the freedom with which he makes these universal design marks. When he recounts a past experience, there is a gentle and honest quality to his gestures that seamlessly morphs into full-bodied, accurate impersonations. Rather than narrate an entire trip to France, for instance, he’ll summarize the influential people on the trip in one or two lithe gestures or sayings. These flashes of movement and cadences of speech are seen, heard, and felt in much the same way that his mark making on clay can be experienced.
This article appeared in the November 2009 issue of Ceramics Monthly.
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Striped melon vase, 16 in. (41 cm) in height, white stoneware, thrown in sections, with multiple slips and glaze, salt fired to cone 10, 2009.
Gess calls this “graphic power” and has the critical distance to trace experiences of this throughout his life, naming some sources for the work he makes today. “I was a camp counselor one summer and the cabin had this zebra pelt on the wall,” says Gess. “I remember it because it was real, graphic, bold, exotic, and patterned. I think, on some level, that was a fundamental experience of what I was interested in-that graphic power. Early on, I was influenced by things like this that percolated for years.”
Working with nine basic marks, Gess breaks up the space on each piece in a different, spontaneous way. The spiral, line, circle, dot, ellipse, square, rectangle, zigzag, and cross can stand alone or function in chorus. Multiplied or patterned, these marks alter the way a piece is experienced. “Pattern is of great interest to me-the way in which space is ordered and adorned logically, intuitively and randomly,” says Gess. “A mark repeated becomes a pattern. The negative space comes into power and the pattern becomes invested with meaning. Patterns have religious meanings and spiritual or esoteric meanings. Pattern has a life of its own and moves through all cultures.”
Squared plate, 9 in. (23 cm) square, thrown and altered white stoneware with multiple slips and glaze, salt fired to cone 10, 2009.
Rather than replicating these patterns exactly-or imposing a rigid, false diversity- Gess treats each piece like a cousin of the one that came before it. Glazing and marking a series of bowls, for instance, one thought leads to the next. This progression appears on the surface of his work so that a piece can stand alone or work intuitively with others in a set. More complex are the five-piece canister sets that Gess began working on a few years ago. These pieces are wheel thrown and hand altered and look rugged and bold, yet subtle in their surface design. “The challenge,” Gess explains, “is to take a shape and [vary] it in size, up and down, larger and smaller-to play with gaining and increasing scale while maintaining a relationship to form. The next trick is to take a surface pattern and integrate it into a number of pieces that can work together as well as individually.”
Just as significant as his mark-making are the forms Gess chooses to make. His favorite pottery has always been the “spirited, populist styles,” such as Medieval English jugs and fifteenth-century Islamic tin-glazed wares. Much of this work was made in large quantities with little regard for each piece as an individual statement. Insistent upon leaving the mark of the handmade, Gess finds value in the occasional awkward base or sloppy lip. This is tempered by his desire to make forms that function fully and properly, the end result being a body of work that evokes his historical influences, adding a touch of modern finesse.
Teapot, 8½ in. (22 cm) in height, thrown and altered white stoneware with multiple slips and glaze, salt fired to cone 10, 2009.
Ultimately, Gess seeks to create work that is infused with a spiritual function as well. The clearest way to summarize his intention in this regard is to quote Daniel Rhodes from the first chapter of the first edition of Clay & Glazes for the Potter. Gess has the quote, as follows, committed to memory: “Pottery, at least to those of us who make it, seems to have a quality which is something quite beyond the sum of its usefulness and beauty. There is in pottery a connection with the earliest traditions of civilization and culture, and pottery forms symbolize in a particularly direct way some of the most fundamental human activities. Any piece of pottery, no matter how crude it is, seems to share in the glory of a craft which, at its best, has succeeded in filling profound human needs, both practical as well as spiritual.”
Growth and experimentation are among these human needs. “It is very difficult to move beyond what one has spent considerable time and effort developing in order to find new ways of working, but the search is critical to the creative process,” says Gess.
Throughout 2009, he has slowly integrated his new work into exhibitions. This work has a clear celadon glaze that turns blue when fired over a black glaze. Like his already established work, the use of layering is still prevalent. But in this case, the universal design marks are painted on top of black glaze with a wax resist. “It’s two different ways of thinking, two different ways of approaching the mark,” he says. “The other work was done with mark-making as well, but this way the wax disappears and the mark is what’s left behind rather than what is put on.”
Sake set, to 5 in. (13 cm) in height, thrown, altered and handbuilt white stoneware with multiple slips and glaze, salt fired to cone 10, 2009.
The year is also scheduled with teaching opportunities for Gess. “The challenge for me is to teach people how to improvise-how to live and learn to make pottery that is of their own self, their own nature or instinct or personality,” says Gess. Much like improvisation in jazz, the spontaneity of mark-making has to come from within. What keeps Gess teaching is the fact that it’s fulfilling to give back. “When I work, I don’t analyze every step for myself, but when I teach I have to articulate things differently.”
Three decades of life and studio experience cannot be summarized in one workshop-or one essay, for that matter. Poignant experiences of graphic power can’t always be replicated. A teacher cannot simply tell a student to live a full life. All of this, however, can be embodied. It can inform everything from reading sheet music to telling stories. It can foster a critical and delightful view of the world, one that provokes the senses with a nod toward the spiritual. It can lend itself to a whole life, a whole potter.
Terry Gess lives in Bakersville, North Carolina, with his wife and textile artist Carmen Grier. He is represented locally by Southern Highlands Craft Guild, Penland Gallery, Crimson Laurel Gallery, and more. To learn more, visit terrygesspottery.com.
the author Katey Schultz writes from her home in Bakersville, North Carolina. To learn more, visit katey.schultz.googlepages.com.
Tags: recipes, slip, Terry Gess
