Touch is the very beginning of Creation.

Henri Focillon 1

From start to finish the potter takes hold of the impalpable void and brings it forth as the container in the shape of a containing vessel. . . . The vessel's thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds.

Martin Heidegger 2

But it is on the space where there is nothing That the utility of the vessel depends.

Lao-Tzu 3

What is most commonplace, most familiar, is often unnoticed, as if it were invisible. One of the things art does is to make visible what is too ordinary to notice, thus making distant and strange what is most near to hand and familiar, making problematical what is most obvious. Indeed, it is arguable that it is this enabling of distancing from the ordinary and uncritical modes of perception in viewer response which distinguish artworks as such. 4 One uses vessels to eat and drink every day without giving them much thought, much less giving thought to their vesselness. A vessel is that which receives, retains, and gives forth. A vessel can receive, retain, and give forth because it is at once exterior and interior, thing and nothing, object and void, what is most obvious and near to hand and what is most abstract and distal.

The making of a clay vessel forms the void by giving form to the clay. If the void that makes the vessel useful is impalpable, the vessel that is a trace of shaping the void is decidedly palpable. These vessels by Liz Lurie and Keith Evans are not slipcast in molds by the thousands, but rather are made by hand, one at a time. For most persons in the post-industrial first world at the beginning of the twenty first century, few things encountered in one's quotidian experience are hand made, individual, unique. Each of these vessel demands one's attending to the aspects that makes it unique, at once different from and alike other vessels, distinct even from other similar vessels. In each, the universal 5 of vessel qua concept is instantiated in the vessel qua actual concrete particular.

Lurie's and Evans' vessels, with their references to the traditional vessels associated with the tea ceremony, are objects for haptic and visual delectation no less than objects for ostensible use. Indeed, it is precisely in the ordinary circumstances of their use that one's tactile and visual delectation is fully engaged. It is in their use that one most fully perceives that each has a particular heft, a distinctive feel, a specific size and unique fit to one's hand, a surface that is a singular mediation between roughess and smoothness of texture. In the relationship between formed clay and glaze both the close control of the hand in making the vessel and in applying glaze, and the distancing of control during firing, function to produce modulations of surface that are in large effect subject to anticipation, but in minute details are beyond calculation.

The vessel is a medium of transmission of a touch deferred. Because they are made by hand, because the clay takes and retains the trace of the hand that forms the clay, the vessel is an intermediary between the hand of the potter and the hand of the user, a conjunction of distal and proximal. As useful objects, Lurie's and Evans' ceramic works function for drinking tea and eating. The occasion of drinking tea, especially in Cha-no-yu, 6 as well as the occasion of meals taken in the company of others, are social conjunctions of the distal and proximal. In these conjunctions, the ostensible function of the event-drinking tea or having a meal-is the medium for something more than the ostensible function to obtain, so that these most ordinary acts are distanced and are bracketed, visible in themselves and as such. Even as are the vessels used in them.

Clockwise from the gallery entrance. Works on a single shelf or pedistal are grouped left to right or clockwise under a single number.

Keith Evans is a retired dentist. He received the D.D.S. from the University of Minnesota. He has been an active potter for decades. Evans said:

I like to make bowls-open space, volume waiting to be filled with frothy green tea, food, loose change-whatever. We need to be open and available like bowls. It makes me happy to know that my bowl will become someone's favorite daily companion.

Liz Lurie is a Dallas studio potter. She received the B.F.A. from Sarah Lawrence University, and subsequently apprenticed with Louise Harter at SuperMud Pottery, New York, and Clare DesBecker Studios, New York. Recent exhibitions include Vermont Clay Studios Exhibition curated by Karen Karnes; Fresh Clay: Emerging Artists curated by Mark Shapiro, Lacoste Gallery, Concord, Massachusetts, 2001; Utilitarian Clay III: Celebrate the Object, Sandy Blain Gallery, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, Gatlinburg, Tennessee; Clay/Wood/Fire/Salt, Contemporary Artifacts Gallery, Berea, Kentucky; Table Talk: Three Voices in Clay, Worcester Center for Crafts, Worcester, Massachusetts, 2000.

1. 1 Henri Focillon, "In Praise of Hands," trans. S. Lane Faison, in Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, trans. George Kubler. (New York: Zone Books, 1992) pp. 157-185. Reprint of the 1948 edition published by Wittenborn, Schultz. Initial publication as La vie des formes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1934). Return
2. 2 Martin Heidegger, "The Thing," Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p.169. Return
3. 3 Lao-Tzu, Tao The Ching, XI. Passage quoted in C. G. Jung, Synchronicity, trans. R. F. C. Hull. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 70. Return
4. 4 See Clement Greenberg, "Intuition and the Esthetic Experience," Homemade Aesthetics: Observations on Art and Taste (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 5. Initial publication as "Seminar One," Arts Magazine 42:2 (Novemeber 1973), being Greenberg's text for his 1971 Bennington Seminars, sponsored by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Note that Greenberg is at pains to distinguish this notion of the fundamentum divisionis of artworks from rather than merely skilled making, as posited in Greek art theory and commonly since. Return
5. 5 As Robert E. Wood notes, 'universal' has its sense from the latin unum versus alia, one-towards-others. A Path Into Metaphysics: Phenomenological, Hermeneutical, and Dialogical Studies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), 45. Return
6. 6 Cha-no-yu is literally "hot water for tea." By extension, it is the tea ceremony. See Sen'o Tanaka, The Tea Ceremony (New York: Harmony Books, 1973, 1977); Urasenke Foundation, The Urasenke Tradition of Chado (Kyoto: Urasenke Foundation, n.d.). Return