I have been making plates with my students. I try to explain about the way our fingers touch clay. I aim to touch just right, to create expressive edges. I am letting the past inform what I make for the future, leaving fingerprints like fossils left behind by the sea.
There’s a soft spot in everything
Our fingers touch,
the one place where everything breaks
When we press it just right.
The past is like that with its arduous edges and blind sides,
The whorls of our fingerprints embedded along its walls
Like fossils the sea has left behind.
–Charles Wright, from “Two Stories,” The Other Side of the River (Random House, 1984)