When I began the first of three round plateau plates in early 2021, I had no image in mind and certainly no intention of illustrating stories, particularly ones from the bible. It was the form that had intrigued me for several years—a large disc with a simple band for a lip that could function as a hanger. I liked the idea that both sides could be equally important and that a plate could easily move from table to wall, like a Shaker chair, by hanging it on a peg.
At the same time that I was inside the studio rolling out slabs for the plates, the world outside seemed in dire straits. In the US, many Americans, including myself, began to realize how much we had been shielded from our country’s history of racism and genocide. Reading daily reports of wildfires, storms, and flooding was unnerving. And when I watched the attack on the Capitol on television, I couldn’t believe this was happening in the US. A few days later, my husband and I drove around the Capitol grounds and were shocked to see the area completely enclosed by fencing. Around the world there were stories about the rise of authoritarianism and the dangerous effects of global warming. And if all that was not frightening enough, there was the terrifying global pandemic.
I am not a religious person, but since childhood I have loved three stories from Genesis—the story of Adam and Eve, the tale of Noah and the Ark, and the story about the building of the Tower of Babel. Recently, these stories kept coming to my rattled mind, and I realized that I was seeing parallels between these ancient cataclysmic tales and present crises. The Fall, when Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge and lose their innocence, was analogous to our growing recognition of past and present injustices in the US. Worldwide reports of rising seas brought the story of Noah and The Flood to my mind. And the destructive potential of global communication to disseminate misinformation reminded me of the story of the Tower of Babel.
In this fatalistic frame of mind and with no clear plan for the plates I had begun making, it occurred to me that here was an opportunity to grapple with my anxiety by working with these haunting stories. To illustrate them, I decided to borrow old images and also make references to recent events.
For The Fall, I took a landscape from an antique maiolica plate made in Toledo, Spain. The tree became the Tree of Knowledge with the addition of apples and a serpent, and Adam and Eve were portrayed in abstract fashion with bowed heads leaving the Garden of Eden. For The Flood, I borrowed the image of Noah’s Ark from the mosaics of Monreale Cathedral in Sicily. Although there is hope in the story—the dove with the olive branch in its beak—in the foreground are drowned bodies and in the distance, the submerged Statue of Liberty. For The Tower, I took the image from Bruegel’s famous painting and added the Manhattan skyline to the background with the Twin Towers and two airplanes.
With just a cobalt wash and some mason stain, I quickly painted the images over layers of still moist white slip, carved a little to expose the tan clay beneath, and then allowed the three plates to dry very slowly before bisque-firing them. Despite careful drying, all three plates cracked at various stages. I made another Flood which did not crack—I used a clay with more grog and adjusted the construction. But I couldn’t bear to make replacements for the other two plates because I knew I could never recreate the spontaneity and urgency of the original painting. I also realized that the undersides were no longer relevant—these would be pieces for the wall. To repair The Fall, I used epoxy and some acrylic paint over the crack, and I turned to Hiromi Minemura for kintsugi repair on The Tower. William Bowser, ceramic artist and former mount maker at the National Gallery of Art, made the mounts.
I’m not sure I will ever do anything like this again. Although I was a painter in the 80s and 90s, I hadn’t done any illustration since I began working with clay in 2014. My focus in ceramics has been surface texture. So in a personal way, this was merging of past and present practices—I enjoyed bringing beloved stories and old images together with my rusty skills in a new medium. And the experience of making these plates was most definitely cathartic in that it allowed me to put my hands on my fears and anxiety and tame them somewhat.
I’m very grateful to Roni Polisar for her suggestions for this piece. For readers who are not familiar with the stories in Genesis, below are a few lines:
THE FALL: The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden
[3:22] Then the LORD God said, "See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever"--
[3:23] therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken.
THE FLOOD: Noah and the Deluge
[6:6] And the LORD was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. [6:7] So the LORD said, "I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created - people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” [7:23] …Only Noah was left, and those that were with him in the ark. [8:10] Noah … sent out the dove from the ark; [8:11] and the dove came back to him in the evening, and there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf; so Noah knew that the waters had subsided from the earth.
THE TOWER: Decline of the Tower of Babel
[11:5] The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. [11:6] And the LORD said, "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. [11:7] Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another's speech." [11:8] So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.