Ellen Fager
Artist Statement
I make pots for use. This project is manifestly absurd in an era when industry provides so variously and inexpensively for our every requirement, but I make pots because I love the work, because some ancient, deep-seated human need drives me to make my mark, and because the clay has not stopped teaching me: about itself, mostly, but also about human nature and time and expectation. I know that my life is enriched by the pots I live with that bear the traces of their maker's hand and eye, and I hope that the lives of the people who own my pots are enriched likewise.
I have always been a wheel-worker; it is a skill I take pleasure in and a discipline that suits me. The wheel dictates the class of forms that I can make, and then I say, What can I make from this? What happens if I paddle it into a different shape? Excise a small sliver, perhaps? Attach another section distorted in some other way? How much can I stretch it, bend it, pound it, cut and paste it, this wonderful ductile, malleable material, without compromising its structural integrity or its ability to serve some useful purpose? The work is research. The work is play. The work is an independent organism, running on ahead, and every time I sit down to a new series, I wonder where it will take me next.
I have been making pots, off and on, for over 40 years. What training I have, I picked up at the old UCSD Crafts Center and in the company of my late husband, Ed Thompson, whose hand and eye were peerless, and whose methodological innovations are an inexhaustible resource.