5 minute read
FRIDAYLECTURESERIES
FRIDAYLECTURESERIES THE EDGE EFFECT
By Chloe Wingerter
“Natura non facet salute” Darwin. (Nature does not make jumps).
In ecological terms, the “edge effect” refers to the change in a population or community structures that occur at the boundary of two or more habitats. (To me, it sounds like a 1980’s razor brand name.) Generally, when the edge effect increases, the habitats exhibit greater biodiversity. The transition zone, the place where habitats merge, is called the ecotone. It is coined from eco(habitat or environment) and -tone from the Greek tonos or tension. Generally, a place where ecologies are in tension.
Taking inspiration from this ecological concept of the edge effect, I have always been curious about the blending of two glazes in pottery, a kind of ecotone in my practice. The uncertainty of what will be the first impression of my labored pots leaves me with an anxious excitement. Opening the kiln to see what unimaginable color emerges on the overlap gives me the same giddy excitement as waiting at the top of the stairs as a kid on Christmas morning. What will Black Licorice glaze look like when I overlap with Ketchup? How about Satin White and Weathered Bronze? This same uncertainty in the overlap that I find myself drawn to in the studio plays out in many facets and experiences beyond its boundaries. It’s the invigorating conversations that form when I find myself hanging on every word of someone who is showing me a different way of seeing, a different perspective. It’s the unexpected sense of home I came to feel in a city I had no intention of moving to in the first place. It’s the gut-feeling I get in my stomach whenever I’m on a flight to somewhere completely new to me. When I came to Craigardan in May, I envisioned walking away with a collection of pieces that explored this idea of the overlap. I imagined creating this certain glaze overlap on each piece in a similar way, by dipping from the top and dipping from the bottom so a linear middle formed with the new glaze. Yet, the more I wrestled with this idea, the more I questioned the expectation of linearity between the edge effect – in nature, in pottery, and in life. Such an effect doesn’t just happen with a quick jump over the line into the ecotone. I don’t just arrive in a new place. Rather, it’s a process of grappling with the uncertain, conflicting, risky, and unnerving nature that comes when I cross the edge into a new territory. Like Darwin says, “Nature does not make jumps.” It’s a feeling of pulling, recentering, stretching, and wobbling. Welcome, little friend, tension.
“This was what Darwin was trying so hard to get his readers to see: that there is never just one way of ranking nature's organisms. To get stuck on a single hierarchy is to miss the bigger picture, the messy truth of nature, the "whole machinery of life." The work of good science is to try and peer beyond the "convenient" lines we draw over nature. To peer beyond intuition where something wilder lives. To know that in every organism at which you gaze, there is complexity you will never comprehend.” – Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don’t Exist
As potters, we try to control the outcome by narrowing down all the variables but in reality, all the tiny invisible interactions that happen on and within a pot between the clay, glaze, and kiln atmosphere, are out of our control. I can study the glaze recipe, stare at the test tile wall for hours, and envision how my pot might look out of the kiln. However, there is no bulletproof formula for how these millions of little variables collide, mesh, comingle, overlap to create something new. Outside the safety of the studio, I constantly have to remind myself of this process when I step into the larger experiments in my life. A pot with an unfavorable overlapped glaze makes for a great Christmas swap gift when I don’t have time to run to the nearby thrift store and pick out an ugly lamp. But on the opposite end of the risk scale, overlapping myself with a new place, person, or experience, well, that undoubtedly puts me on more shaky ground. Whether inside the studio or outside, tension arrives, often uninvited. Part of the process, for me, is feeling my way through the varying levels of risk and discomfort to see what glaze, or greater outcome, might show up at the end of the experiment. The irony is that I originally sat down to write this piece in order to debunk the edge effect. I wanted to use it as a point of inspiration for my studio work and argue that edges, lines, and boundaries don’t exist where collaboration, overlap, and intersection occur. As I tried to articulate that in written word, edges and boundaries were all around me. I arrived at Craigardan before the studio barn was complete. Once I got into the studio, centering a piece of clay felt as foreign as my lost high-school Spanish. Even trying to write this exact piece about edges not existing felt like hitting a wall. My a-ha! moment came when realizing that everything around us is a line, edge, or boundary. Literally everything. So where does this leave this written article and my anticipated collection in the studio? I sat down to write about the magic I felt when these overlapped things come together, and ended up writing all about the tension. So, I present you with another edge. I can’t tell you what my final collection will look like when I drive down Route 9N and away from Craigardan. I can’t tell you if I’ll even overlap glazes on my pieces. But I can tell you that I will continue to face edges, boundaries, and lines all around me, each and every day, in the studio and outside. It is a never-ending process of being stretched and shaped, doubtful and hopeful, hesitant and confident, and a million other cell-jumping feelings in between. It is the energy and combustion of all of this that feels like magic.
