Empty Bowls: Pottery and Purpose
By Jackie Seaton
On the door of my fridge is a yellowing headline I clipped from a newspaper years ago: “I heard the news today, oh boy…” It greets me each morning, without a lot of information but still reminding me of the world out there.
My daily dilemma is this: do I shut the world out to better get on with my work as a studio potter, concentrating on producing beautiful objects to grace people’s domestic lives? Or do I embrace the world, lug some of its woes into my private work space and try to deal with them in some tangential way, one handful of clay at a time?
There is no right or wrong response. A few individuals who have mentored me during my career in clay over the last thirty years have lived lives devoted to artistic self-expression and the creation of form. We need people like that. They remind us that some things in this life are worth doing for their own sake and that a beautiful object, image or utensil can harmonize our responses to a discordant world. These artists and philosophers are among the greatest of teachers.
But I have known other mentors as well. Their work, their community and their private lives all seem to be integrated. What their place is in this exquisitely beautiful but sometimes unhappy world does not trump what they make of the daily news nor blur their view of human hardships around them.
By temperament I belong in the second camp. As I make my way from the fridge I am just as likely to head to the studio to begin throwing as I am to turn left at my study to review the recent Workbook on Child Health and Poverty in Lanark-Leeds-Grenville. That might sound a little weird but indeed, there is a connection which for me took hold of my studio life some years ago.
Most summers I invite a ceramics student from NSCAD or Sheridan College to work with me in my studio near Perth. I usually find this time stimulating and fruitful in many ways. Seven or eight years ago I employed a young intern named Aidan Hammond who had just helped coordinate an empty bowls fundraiser at school in Halifax. He managed to transmit all the challenges and satisfactions of that experience in a way that opened a door for me and which has since extended my practice of pottery making in all kinds of unforeseen directions. Above all else, it has added a dimension of social relevance and purpose to my work as a production potter.
Doesn’t it just make you so mad and ashamed to know that there are children of full time working parents whose wages are so low they must still depend on food banks for nourishment? That there are families without homes because shelter is a commodity beyond their price range? That by 40 minutes after noon on January 1 the average Canadian CEO will have earned more than his minimum wage employee will make over the following 12 months? (Canadian Centre For Policy Alternatives: Minimum Wage Factsheet).
I could go on. I haven’t even touched on the high risk groups: kids with special needs, immigrant families, single moms. Check this one out: “After paying the rent, a lone parent on social assistance can only afford groceries for one week a month.” (HRDC, 2003: Understanding the 2000 Low Income Statistics Based on the Market Basket Measure. Statistics Canada, 2001 Census.)
This kind of stuff should shame us all. I was moved a few weeks ago when I read the acceptance speech of Muhammad Yunus, the winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize. Yunus founded the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh that provides micro loans to poor people, mostly women. He writes, “Poverty is the absence of all human rights. The frustrations, hostility and anger generated by abject poverty cannot sustain peace in any society… I became involved in the poverty issue not as a policymaker or a researcher. I became involved because poverty was all around me.”
The trick, of course, is to actually look around.
There is no Canadian city or town immune from the effects of poverty and sadly this is not going to change any time soon. I have no illusions about the impact a single individual can make. On the other hand, Empty Bowls has engaged the support of hundreds of donors providing a small but reliable level of sustainable funding for its recipients ($10,000 a year). It also performs an equally important task and that is to shine a light on what has become a dark and apparently permanent stain on the fabric of our society.
I would never try to force this mingling of art and economics on colleagues by suggesting they have a special obligation, as artists, to pay attention. And yet why does it not surprise me when a significant proportion of artists or artisans take the time to engage on some level in matters of human rights and human dignity?
The answer could be mundane. Many craftspeople and artists have traded away the security of more lucrative and stable careers in order to simply do the work they love to do each and every day. They are familiar with economic vulnerability. Deep down, however, I believe it’s more complicated. To do nothing amounts to a failure of imagination. For people whose stock in trade is imagination, there is a special challenge in imagining a better world and a more humane culture in which it might be achieved. I feel privileged to be able to use the tools of my craft to this end. I highly recommend it to others.
Empty Bowls in Perth raises $10,000 annually for the Perth and District Food Bank, the YAK Youth Centre, and Food For Thought, a school breakfast program in Lanark County. Handmade stoneware bowls by Jackie Seaton are available for donation at Riverguild Fine Crafts in Perth. For more information or to donate visit the Empty Bowls website or contact Jackie.