Kate Tremel

My work has always been linked to the idea of the vessel or containment. While my explorations have ranged from mixed media sculptures formed around plaster casts of my body to the current pierced patterns in the thin walls of porcelain pots, this interest in the vessel is rooted in the pot’s relationship to the body. The body is present in the idea of the the breath or volume that I slowly give the form as I pound the stiff clay between my paddle and rock and burnished skin-like surface that the clay takes on as I work the piece with a wooden paddle and stone anvil, cradling it in my lap.

I learned this paddle and anvil technique in an 18-month internship with a Peruvian potter while I was an undergraduate student of anthropology and Spanish studying in Lima. I have always liked the connection to the history of makers that ceramics affords. While I seek to find fresh interpretations for the everyday vessel, I hope that the image of the terracotta village pot is still evident in my work. Despite the many differences and disparities, on many levels, my life is not so different from the potters that I have met in my travels around the world. I appreciate the accessibility and communication inherent in pots. Everyone understands a bowl. The connections that my pots create as they become part of the fabric of people’s lives is very important. I am interested in making forms that bring little bits of beauty to the everyday rituals of life.

I don’t think that I will ever lack challenges in working with clay. I am continually humbled by it. In this current body of work, attempting to deconstruct the thin walls of the clay in its most fragile state is really a metaphor for life. I’m trying to capture that fleeting moment of beauty before the piece crumbles in my hands and preserve it, even if just for a time, in a slightly less vulnerable fired state. The essence of this beauty is its tenuousness, like the flower, glorious, yet shadowed by the knowledge of its eventual death. Working with clay is not really a choice for me, but more of a need or compulsion. Its tactile qualities are seductive and getting dirty is important.