Creation, Destruction, And Recreation: The Life And Work Of Ceramicist Ramah Commanday
A potter puts all her knowledge, experience and artistry into the shaping of clay, and then must relinquish all that control to the kiln’s destructive and transformative heat. The life of ceramicist Ramah Commanday underwent a similar process, when her peaceful artist’s life as in the Napa Valley was dramatically reforged by the intensity of California wildfires.
Now resettled in to her new home and studio in Germantown, the 72-year-old climate refugee saw her home, studio, and decades of creative output destroyed by the Glass Fire of September 26, 2020 – named for Glass Mountain, which she used to see out her former bedroom window. After the fire, as she sifted through the wreckage of her home, she says she felt like an archeologist, unearthing the artifacts of her own life.
“I basically fled the fire with a bag, and found out two days later my house and studio were destroyed,” says Commanday, who holds a doctorate in educational psychology and worked for 20 years in California public schools. “I lost a tremendous amount of finished work. It was like being a ghost and coming back 500 years later. As awful as the fire was I was curious what would happen to the pottery in the additional ‘firing.’”
As she dug she felt both loss and intrigue, finding work of her own, friends and her son, all of it changed in color and texture: smooth edges now rough, colors darker, bits of burnt house fused to surfaces. She found a simple earthenware mustard jar, now conjoined with jagged pieces of kitchen masonry. She found great big round pots she’d made, re-glazed and speckled red by the vaporized copper from a nearby jar of pennies.
Prior to the fire, between her 59th and 60th birthdays, Commanday made a simple bowl every single day. She had planned for them to be displayed together as a spiraling instillation piece. Most were totally destroyed. Those that were only somewhat broken she repaired with mortar infused with gold dust in the Japanese kintsugi style.
Japanese pottery practices have had a major influence on her style, especially when subjecting her work to a wood-fired kiln. She also has a great affinity for aesthetic philosophy of “wabi-sabi,” which embraces the beauty in natural imperfections and impermanence.
While much of Commanday’s old work certainly proved to be impermanent, a lot of her pre-wildfire work actually was saved. She was on the verge of presenting a gallery exhibition at her undergrad alma mater, UC Santa Cruz, when the pandemic hit and the pieces locked down at the college were spared from the fire. Other pieces were in storage elsewhere, as Commanday was already planning to move to the Hudson Valley to get away from the potential of fire and to be near her community of east coast friends and ceramicists. But COVID held up her move to Germantown. Had it not, she would have left before the fire struck.
“I feel incredibly privileged to be here,” she says of her new home. “I’m close to nature and a community that’s kind and altruistic and artistic.”
Commanday has built a new life for herself, and a new body of work has evolved from her experience — not just the wildfire, but her long journey with ceramics in America, Israel and Japan. The new series of vessels she is making echoes the theme of creation and destruction that flows through this story. With great care, time and effort she turns a pot on her wheel. Then she waits for the clay to be just the right consistency and she attacks its opening in a sudden moment of force, tearing and cutting, creating wing-like shapes or a pseudo-basket handle. The results are vases that visually tell the story of their creative process. The torn edges of the openings have the added benefit of gripping stems in interesting ways for dynamic flower arraignments.
“This new series of vases is made on the wheel and then altered quickly and spontaneously,” she says. “It’s like the firing process, you’re exposing the material to cataclysm. I was influenced by that. I’m imposing energy on it that’s going to be recorded.”
She paints a porcelain slip across her pieces before firing. Its texture crackles in the kiln like a desert ground pattern, while retaining the gestural lines of her brush strokes.
“The world is made of the same materials that I'm working with. And I’m accessing the processes that formed the world, and everything else,” she says. “I'm taking the same materials and subjecting them to, basically, the same forces that the Earth is subjected to.”
Commanday seems at peace with the wildfire that changed her life. She’s examined it critically and existentially and has come out with something powerful to say in her new series.
“You feel the force, and there's something in us that viscerally responds to that,” she says. “A lot of the art you see is at least as much about the narrative as it is about the thing. Even if somebody approaches the work knowing nothing about any part of the process, I want them to be able to tell their own story.”
Commanday’s studio gallery is currently open for visits by appointment and work is for sale. Now that her home kiln is installed, she will soon have more pieces in local galleries and online as well. On September 2 and 3, she will also have her art and process on display for the first time, in the Art Studio Views, a free, self-guided tour of artist workspaces across northern Dutchess and southern Columbia county.
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