Solidify your imagination

Last fall I visited Marc Hudson’s garage studio to watch him throw. The six pound lump of clay that he plopped onto his wheel was completely amorphous. As Marc described it, the clay, “Doesn’t have any opinions about its final destiny. It’s the byproduct of erosion and it doesn’t mind that. When people see clay (or a blank sheet of paper or an empty canvas) they need to create something, to use it to solidify their imagination.”

It’s physical – he leans his body into the clay as he slowly moves around the piece, allowing it to take shape. First it becomes a tall cylinder, and as he coaxes the walls to expand, to be less than an eighth inch thick, until it becomes what he calls a “rumptious round.”

It looks like a form of meditation. It turns out that when he began working with clay, that’s exactly what it was.

He had just been drafted to the Viet-Nam war. He said, “The fact that I could contribute to killing people just by doing what I was told was hard to accept. I needed a relaxing center in clay as an alternative to being in the military.”

Since then, working with clay has been a long creative journey where Marc has developed his sense of style by devising experiments that allow him to get the results that he wants.

For example, he wasn’t getting the results that he wanted using commercial glazes. The list of people available to teach him how glaze materials work was pretty short and he wasn’t getting the answers he needed.

He bought tools – a scale for measuring ingredients, bags of chemicals, books with recipes and chemical analyses of ingredients, and software that describes how ingredients interacted with one another – and experimented.

He wasn’t being a perfectionist; he just wanted glazing to be an adventure. He said, “My usual approach to clay is to exercise considerable control while it is on the wheel or in the extruder, so it is refreshing to let my guard down and let the glaze act and react serendipitously.”

“Wood ash particularly appeals to me as a primary ingredient in glazes because it is a bit of a ‘wild card,’ its effect somewhat unpredictable,” Hudson said. “Ash likes to flow at high temperatures, yet its surface tension tries to make the glaze bead up–like a struggle between control and abandonment.”

He devised a system of organization that allows him to easily look up the recipe for any glaze. Over a thousand glazes on test tiles are coiled on the ceiling of his studio. The tiles are all numbered and grouped by thirty on each string.

“While I enjoyed mixing and testing glazes a great deal, my wife told me that I needed to just get on with making pots!” said Hudson. “But learning about clay and glazes is a journey.”

One of his favorite glazes was made possible by his experiments. He wanted to reproduce the recipe for Richard Aerni’s wood ash glaze that was featured in Ceramics Monthly in December 1994. The problem was that Aerni single-fired his pots at cone 10 in a reduction kiln whereas Hudson bisque and glaze fired at cone 6 in an electric kiln. Through experimentation he was able to make a glaze with ash from the fireplace that could be fired at cone 6.

The high chaparral that lines the Rio Grande River between the Jemez and Sangre de Cristo mountains is where Hudson finds inspiration. Many of his pieces are ornamented with a cholla cactus branch. In order to imitate the cactus he designed his own extruder dies.

His innovations with the extruder make his dies more user-friendly and long lasting. He uses an unequal leg aluminum angle in the place of a U-bolt. The pressure of clay deforms the centerpiece of the U-bolt and causes wear and tear. Aluminum doesn’t bend the same way and lasts longer because it is on the shear.

He holds the die parts together with pop rivets, which are easy to adjust. This setup minimizes the clutter inside the die.

His father was a physicist who made oil paintings of physical phenomena like shock waves and crystals forming. Whenever Marc used design, technology and experimentation to let others see what was in his imagination, he followed his father’s example.

He had mastered his craft enough that when his father died, Marc was free to make an urn that was meaningful to him and his family. After dividing his father’s shes into the four urns he sprinkled some of the ashes onto the glaze before firing. The urns turned out beautifully, but more important, he was able to honor his father in a way that resonated with him and once again find peace with clay.

Marc Hudson is part of a new Website; www.printedculture.com. Printed Culture makes art more accessible by creating calendars, prints, posters and greeting cards from photographs of works of art and giving the featured artists a percentage of the profits.