On the Consequence of Touch

Douglas Gray, Associate Professor of Art at Francis Marion University

It has been said that clay is its own best teacher.  In other words, if you pay attention while you work the clay, it will tell you what to do.   The truth behind this statement lies in the fact that a relationship exists between the maker's touch and the medium's response.   This is as true for clay as it is for farming, baking a loaf of bread, selling a car, or for that matter brain surgery and space travel. To really learn how to manipulate a material and express yourself through it, you must first know what it can and can't do. The better you know your material, the more practiced your skills; the more successful your efforts.   It all revolves around the awareness of touch.

Perhaps, when I first started working in clay twenty years ago I did not fully understand the subtlety of this lesson.  I did, however, get the broad picture. It's simple physics, really. For every action there is a reaction. Each time I touch the clay—pull it, stretch it, paddle it, wet it, dry it, break it—for each of my own actions there is a response from the clay. If I don't like the response, then I need to reevaluate my own actions.   Every touch leaves an impression. Touch can occur in a multitude of ways, with the fingers or tools, a brush or spray gun, even heat and flame. And these actions can occur at any stage within the process from wet, to bone dry, to bisque, glaze and beyond. All actions leave marks that stand as a visual record of the maker's hand. The key is simply to be aware.   Gauge and evaluate the effects of touch.  

A simple lesson--basic, in fact.  But if that same lesson is applied to life in general, then evidence of the power of touch becomes amplified.  

Anyone who has had more than a casual conversation with me in the past four years has heard that my wife and I are proud adoptive parents. Our problems with fertility and the subsequent pursuit of adoption ceased to be private long ago.   Consequently, I can tell you now, with all openness, that in the arduous years it took to start our family, my life felt like an immense maze fraught with all too many twists and turns and inevitable dead ends. I found myself using the term "maze" in conversation to describe the quite literal feelings I experienced of being lost in the process. Then one day, after finishing a meal at Jin Jin's, a Chinese restaurant near the university where I work, I came across a fortune cookie that quietly professed, "You will soon find your way through the maze."

I was...well, amazed, to say the least. There was no celestial intervention or profound epiphany but at that moment, using my own words, this little cookie touched me in the most direct way, reminding me that, "this too shall pass."   I had found, seemingly by accident, a message that spoke clearly and pointedly to my own condition; a message that originated a great distance from me in both space and time yet still held an immediate and specific significance in my own life.   It touched me because it was the right message at the right time.  Weeks later, in January 2003, we received a referral for our son, a beautiful little two-year-old boy from Kathmandu, Nepal.  And in 2005, my wife and I returned to Nepal in search of a second child, a girl this time, precious, and also two years old.  

As I held each of my children for the first time, I was reminded of that lesson I learned from clay, that there is immense power in touch.  It is a lesson and responsibility I have not taken lightly.  What has surprised me, however, is the ease with which the roles of both maker and medium have been shared among the members of my family.   I could not say with any certainty today what has been greater, my impression on them or theirs on me.

Looking back, it seems apparent to me now that one never really emerges from the maze of life.  Rather one's objectives are met or more often they shift and you find yourself heading full steam into a new maze, just as soon as you've emerged from the last.   My interpretation of that fortune may have changed, but that doesn't lessen the bewilderment and reassurance I felt when I first read it.   To this day, I remain impressed by the communicative potential of a fortune cookie.  In fact, as a father, teacher and shaper of clay, I have sought to emulate that modest form of communication.  What a rare talent to be able to say the right thing at the right time to the right person.   And in doing so, to touch them with some tidbit of wisdom or experience. 

I believe it is this primal desire to touch another individual in a meaningful way that has driven the creation of every method of communication we have at our disposal today—music, dance, visual art, theater, poetry, even blogs.   The real problem is not finding a means of communication but rather cultivating the message that is to be conveyed so that the resulting touch is of consequence to those who feel it.   

On a grand scale, everything done and said, even the things that are left undone or unsaid—all good actions and bad actions, all reactions and inactions—all make impressions on the people, places, and things around us.   In this light, we are not so much what we eat, but rather what we touch and what touches us.  Life itself is still very much like a lump of clay—in process of creation, of becoming something else.  And we are fortunate to be able to assume the role of maker and object made.   We can even presume to be the actual touch itself.  It is a simple lesson, really, learned from clay.   There is a consequence to our actions.  The key is simply to remain vigilant and aware.

November 2007