Blythe Eastman

Ceramicist

Sometimes I think that creating clay animals is one of the things I’m designed for. For most of my life, I have been sculpting animals out of one substance or another. For kindergarten ‘Show and Tell’, I sculpted dogs and cats out of the wax on gouda cheese balls. A few years later, I started making snow horses and snow cows instead of snowmen. These days, I use clay shaped roughly into the form of some animal caught in an instant of time. After the clay animal is fired, I bury it in sawdust, then light the sawdust on fire. When the burn is done, I am left with smoke colored animals. I brush ashes off them, look them over and either put them away until they go to a gallery, or leave them out to keep me company while I make more. 

My animals look the way they do because this is how my hands do poetry. There is enough there to capture the moment, but no more.