Peace in, stress out
Nov 30, 2025
Michael Cardew, William Marshall, Bernard Leach. Taken while picnicking at Cardew’s pottery, 1970. Courtesy of Jeff Oestreich
There are moments in life that end up becoming markers of time, little anchors people look back to. If life took place in a vacuum, time would not mean anything. It needs direction to feel real, and that direction often comes through those universal milestones: a child being born, the slow growing up of that child, family events, marriages, and even the medical things everyone eventually goes through. These things existed before and will continue long after. At some point people notice they are inside that continuum, not outside looking in. And once that happens, reflection shows up on its own.
That sense of time folding back on itself surfaced because of a class happening at Gas Works NYC, a series of pottery lectures. One of them focused on Dave the Potter, a nineteenth century enslaved African American potter who made large utilitarian stoneware for everyday use: salt, pork, pickling, the ordinary cycles of life. What set his work apart was the inscriptions he carved into them. Poetry, marks, and lines written at a time when it was illegal for him to read or write. That act still feels astonishing.
A pot by Dave the Potter by Carlos Chavarria for The New York Times
Once a poem is carved into something meant to store salt, the object stops being only a storage vessel. It begins to live in two registers at once, usefulness and something more. That idea has always been part of the larger conversation about what art is. A teapot can remain a teapot, but embellish it in the right way and suddenly it occupies another realm.
Some, like Richard Serra, argued that architects could never be artists because function limits freedom. A building must serve, and in that view, art cannot come from anything bound to purpose.
But Dave’s pots complicate that argument. They were utilitarian by design, nothing ambiguous about that. Yet the inscriptions shift them into another category. They become meditations on time, on circumstance, on a historical moment filled with contradictions. They hold a narrative he was not permitted to express but managed to carve anyway.
This raises another thought: when does an artwork reveal itself fully? A painting might look simple at first, but once its story is known, how it was made and what was happening around it, it expands. The meaning deepens. Context becomes part of the piece.
That is how Dave’s vessels operate. They are powerful as objects, but once the surrounding history enters the room, everything opens up. The courage it took to write, the impossibility of the act, the way those jars have carried memory for generations, all of it elevates the work into something larger than craft.
Maybe the real question is not about categories at all. Not whether an object is art or utility, or whether narrative is required. Maybe the more interesting idea is how objects transcend themselves, how something built for everyday use can still carry the weight of meaning. A pot can remain a pot and still be more. A work of art can serve a function and remain free. These lines are not as rigid as they are often made out to be.
In the end, any artwork, clay or otherwise, can become a marker of time. It can hold cultural memory, speak for the moment it came from, and keep something alive that might otherwise disappear. Whether it once held salt or held nothing at all barely matters. The overlap between utility and art is often where the most resonant objects reside.
