Thank you to all the artists who submitted works to State of Clay. The field of works showed passion, inventiveness, and a joy in creating. The works were diverse in approach, and showed vigorous personal exploration. As a juror, I had to make judgment calls to select the eighty-one works for the show from a field of 128 submissions. I looked for resolution in the works selected that spoke to the viewer. There are many languages. Some artists make technical excellence sit up and sing, while others use the energy of spontaneous gesture to dance into a viewer’s consciousness. Every rule in art can be broken, if done the right way, and that stepping over the line becomes a part of the message. Art can surprise by making the whole greater than the sum of the parts. Some days this is a calculated assembly; some days intuition and an artist’s subconscious drives the bus. All of this makes the challenge of art-making new every studio day. Observation, learning, and practice count, but each day is its own challenge. You bring your deep personal resources as well as your cultivated knowledge to the table. I have learned much from other people’s works. Thank you for offering to share your perspectives in clay with the greater community of artists and art appreciators. We all benefit from this. I am reminded that we learn more from our failures than our successes, although we certainly enjoy the successes more. The ceramic community is a warm, sharing group, perhaps because we all continue to fail regularly on the path to those wonderful successes. We keep each other company on that trip, and are reminded that it’s about the journey more than the destination. Linda Arbuckle
