Joan Lederman is a potter living in Woods Hole. She uses materials from all over the world in the creation of her mugs and pots.
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Joan Lederman is sitting in a little one-room cottage on the ocean, and the only sound is the hum of her potter's wheel. Her studio in Woods Hole has that look of disarray typical of a "get-your-hands-dirty" kind of workspace. There're rags, buckets, a couple of stools and tables, and lots of clay.
Joan: "So yeah, you do sorta throw a blob on, and the first stage of centering is the one that needs the most lubrication. Some potters use a lot of water during the whole process. I don't...."
Joan's pottery pieces are unique not because of how she makes them but because of what she puts on them. Her material comes to her from an unusual source. Geologist, Eben Franks, from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution:
Eben: "After 5 or 6 or 8 years of collecting mud on cruises and letting it pile up in a shipping container behind the building, a woman walked into the lab one day - a local artist - and she says, "They tell me you have mud." I told her that she came to the right place. I've got 5 or 8 hundred pounds, and you can have whatever you want. And a lot of the material she uses is from all over the world."
On Joan's first attempt using the sea mud, she put a sample in her kiln and discovered that it melted and formed stunning colors and patterns.
Eben:"We have some sediment that we've given her that's 40 million, 50 million years old. And it's been formed into remarkable pieces of art."
Joan:"And this one looks like melted dark chocolate when I paint it on. Eben said it's one of the oldest muds they have. It's from the KT boundary."
Eben:"As it turns out, different sediments from different places in the world have different chemical compositions and produce different color patterns. You never know what kind of magic there'll be when the kiln opens."
The colors and patterns made by the sea mud radiate like the dendrites of nerve cells or the branches of arteries and veins. The muds all behave differently once they're fired. One of Joan Lederman's bowls has over a dozen different sea muds painted side by side all around the inside.
Joan:"There are so many muds on here, and I was trying to apply them all. So, let's see we have Black Sea, Red Sea, the Dead Sea...Now those are nice thick dendrites. Those are the ones that are almost chewy...Indian Ocean
The uniqueness and complexity of each sample of mud have actually made Joan's work easier. She used to create interesting colors and designs by separating and remixing chemicals that she bought from art stores. Using sea mud makes that process unnecessary."
Joan:"I like the sea muds because I don't have to take them apart and put them together again. They already are together from the natural processes that are far more beautiful probably than anything that we'll ever figure out how to produce mechanically."
When Joan gets a new sample, it's like an experiment. She can only guess what kinds of colors and patterns it will form in the end.
Joan:"After a few days, I'm visualizing all the time. If the phone rings, sometimes if I go to answer it, I can barely get to the part of my brain that creates words. There are all of these disappointments, you know. The things that I really wanted to come out a certain way usually don't. But other things come out better than I ever could have guessed."
After applying the sea mud, Joan loads a batch of about a hundred pieces into a gas kiln and fires them to over 23 hundred degrees Fahrenheit.
Joan:"I can't really tell by the sound alone, so I'm going to look and see how much back pressure there is from the spy holes, and that's going to tell me when it's oxidizing which I want it to do."
The chemistry within the kiln's atmosphere can make a glaze vary from red to green, sometimes on the same pot. Joan used to have an older kiln that didn't produce satisfactory results. Now she has a state-of-the-art kiln, and before she unloads it, she always plays a CD made by her late husband, Perry, a guitarist who died of cancer several years ago.
Joan:"I thought, well, what if I did have 10,000 dollars to spend on a kiln. And I just let it plant and grow in my head....So I called a friend and I said how much do you think I could get for one of Perry's guitars, since he had already died. And he said, well how much do you need? And I said 10,000 dollars. And he said, 'I'll buy it.' It was that easy. It was a leap of, Joan, don't you think you really ought to have a tool that's better than the one you've been using for a few years so unsuccessfully. So that's how this kiln came to be, and that's why I play Perry's guitar when I unload it."
After the 12-hour firing and the cooling period, Joan finally opens the kiln door and peeks inside. What went in looks entirely different coming out.
Joan:"Look! Isn't that amazing? There's so much. I can't even really begin to see it yet. Ooh. Wow. Look at this. Oh wow. Wow. In this one the drips passed over a darker green glaze and it dragged some of the minerals that are in the dark glaze. And it sort of made these spots that are brown on the outside with golden crystalline on the inside. It looks almost like peacock feathers, doesn't it? Now this is why I watch really carefully when I unload a firing, because when I see things that happen by accident, I begin to try for those in the future, to do them on purpose. Like those spots are really beautiful."
Joan inscribes each piece with the longitude, the latitude, and the depth of the sea mud sample.
Joan Lederman's studio, called "The Soft Earth", is set back in a field in Woods Hole, just past the Coast Guard Station. Her hours are summer afternoons by appointment or by chance.
Joan: "Oh yes, it did nice branching..Ooh! And that red. Ooh! The branching pattern sure is beautiful."
Tracy Hampton is a staff reporter for WCAI-WNAN.
To see pots that you can make your own, visit the Soft Earth Online Store.
