Creating Through Gathering Storms

2018 was a year of white ceramics and gathering darkness. While my hands shaped clean, elegant dishes in the studio, forces beyond my knowledge or control were quietly reshaping the landscape of my life. Looking back now, I can see how my work from that period—pristine white glaze on white clay—reflected both my attempt to find purity and peace, and perhaps my unconscious denial of the storms that were building on every horizon.

Something was wrong with my body, though I couldn't yet name it. The fatigue that lingered too long, the subtle changes that whispered of deeper troubles—all the early signs of what would eventually be diagnosed as the "C" word. But in 2018, it was still just unease, just a persistent feeling that my body was trying to tell me something I wasn't ready to hear.

At the same time, death seemed to be stalking everyone I loved. Friends who should have had decades ahead of them were suddenly gone. Family members who had been constants in my world simply weren't there anymore. Even our beloved pets, those faithful companions who ask for nothing but give everything, were leaving us. Each loss felt like another weight added to my chest, another reason to question the reliability of anything good in life.

My soul ached with a depth I had never experienced before. It was the kind of grief that makes you wonder if you'll ever feel light again, if joy is something that happens to other people, if the world will always feel this fragile and uncertain.

Despite everything—or perhaps because of everything—I kept creating. My hand-built dishes became my anchor in a world that felt increasingly unstable. I would spend hours in the studio, rolling slabs and forming plates and bowls with the kind of focused attention that temporarily quieted the noise in my heart. The physical act of building with clay provided a rhythm my life had lost everywhere else.

Without a home studio kiln, I became a nomad of firing, seeking out open space in kilns wherever I could find it. Community centers, other artists' studios, ceramic shops that would rent kiln space—I learned to be resourceful, to plan ahead, to work around other people's schedules and firing preferences. This hunt for kiln space became part of my practice, a reminder that creation often requires persistence and adaptation.

Every piece from this period was white glaze on white clay. Not cream, not off-white, not ivory—pure, clean white. At the time, this choice felt instinctive rather than calculated. White seemed to represent possibility, cleanliness, a fresh start. White was hopeful in a way that darker colors weren't. White suggested that despite everything falling apart around me, something pure could still emerge from my hands.

The dishes themselves were elegant in their simplicity. Hand-built but refined, functional but beautiful. They were pieces that could hold food for family gatherings, assuming we would keep having family gatherings. They were vessels for normal life, created during a time when normal was becoming increasingly elusive.

While I worked in white clay, pouring my grief and uncertainty into vessels meant to serve and nourish, my marriage was quietly dissolving. My former husband had begun what would be his final affair—the one that would end everything—with a colleague whose existence I was blissfully unaware of. The betrayal was happening in real time, but I was focused on clay and kilns and the immediate grief of visible losses.

There's something particularly cruel about being betrayed while you're already struggling. While I was processing death and illness and the fundamental unreliability of bodies and relationships, the person who should have been my support was actively undermining the foundation of our life together. But I worked in white clay, still believing in purity, still hoping for clean outcomes in a messy world.

Looking at photographs of my work from 2018 now, I can see what I couldn't see then: these white dishes were made in the eye of a hurricane. They represent a brief moment of calm before multiple storms converged—the cancer diagnosis, the discovery of infidelity, the pandemic that was still two years away but would complete the dismantling of everything I thought I could count on.

The white glaze that seemed so hopeful then now looks prophetic—like snow before an avalanche, like the calm surface of water before a storm, like the moment of silence before everything changes forever. My hands were creating vessels for a life that was already ending, though I wouldn't understand that for months to come.

These white dishes serve as witnesses to a particular kind of innocence—the innocence of not yet knowing how bad things can get, of still believing that if you work hard enough and love enough and create enough beauty, you can somehow protect yourself and the people you care about from life's cruelties.

They also witness something else: the human capacity to keep creating even when everything is falling apart. Even when your body is betraying you and death is taking everyone you love and your marriage is dissolving behind your back, your hands can still shape clay. You can still find kilns. You can still choose white glaze and believe, against all evidence, that purity is possible.

The dark clouds were indeed gathering in 2018, but I was still working in white clay, still building vessels to hold whatever came next. Sometimes the most poignant art comes from the moment before you know how the story ends, when hope and denial are still indistinguishable, when your hands keep working even as your world prepares to transform forever.