Is Beauty Enough?

Day; 26. Windy, cold, trying to snow. Temperature on  outside kiln; 38

Everyday at 4pm  I listen to Democracy Now on NPR with host Amy Goodman. It's just a habit with me, like checking in with Instagram at lunch, I'm just trying to connect with the outside world within the confines of my own studio and it's accompanying isolation.  I feel a need to know what's  happening  on Planet Earth on any given day   beyond that which has occurred here at Magpie Pottery. Today Amy interviewed actor Robert Redford at the Sundance Film Festival which he started 31 years ago. Such an interesting guy; studied art in Paris,  famous Oscar-winning director, political activist,  environmental documentary film maker...gorgeous hunk, but that's beside the point I know.

Anyway, it really cast me back 20 years to grad school when I  and fellow students would often argue about the role of the artist in our culture. Many of the sculptors and painters upstairs vehemently felt that art should be in the public interest and that the old modernist idea of the lone painter toiling away in his garret studio was passe. The potters in the basement however felt differently, and I was somewhere in- between. Having finished an undergrad degree in environmental studies a few years earlier, I sympathized with the political and social consciousness  of the conceptual artists I  had critiques with every month. But the potters downstairs were my real tribe and I understood their urge to simply make  beautiful objects out of clay despite the happening s in the wider world outside the studio.

And although I had put this issue to bed for myself by the time I received my MFA, it still haunts me sometimes. Like today, listening to Bob talk about republicans, climate change, and  the Colorado River and it's inability to reach the Sea of Cortez anymore.   I mean the world is  going to hell in a hand-basket and I 'm making cereal bowls. WTF?!  The old environmentalist in me feels chagrined.  Am I acting irresponsibly?  Is producing hand-made tableware enough anymore?

By the end of the broadcast  I ended up where I always do; with a resounding Yes!  Yes there is a place for beautiful handmade objects in this beleaguered world. And it's enough for me to focus my  life's work on adding to the beauty in it.