In the fall of 1989, the iron curtain was being rattled in Eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall fell on November 9th. The first of December we moved to Heidelberg, Germany to live another sabbatical adventure year. Soon we had dinner in a pub in the oldest part of Heidelberg and I noticed the handmade pottery. When I asked, indeed, it came from a pottery in a walled town just up the Neckar River. I visited the owner Alfred Hering, who invited me to work at his mail-order, functional pottery. Adding to the intense culture experience I had there was a Cretian master potter and four East German young potters. Of the refugees, who all worked together in the large main room, only Julia Arnold spoke some English. During the months leading up to reunification of the two Germanys, it seemed everyday there were new exposes of the atrocities of the Honecker regime and the defiled SS. The radio was always on in the pottery and every hour a news break describing the latest unbelievable encroachment on civil liberties. Every day Julia gave me a synopsis of the uncovered horrors. And I witnessed the shock, amazement and fear my new friends were experiencing in the deconstruction of their homeland.
Here I had a little space working on a sculpture series titled: SIGNS OF THE TIMES: THE AGE OF WALLS I have been working with the concept of breaking through, tearing down walls. The idea is intensely personal in my interior life, as breaking out of the box has been a life-long theme. I witnessed the power of the creative spirit, as I worked with inmate artists, who found freedom of spirit in creative clay work. It was as if they were not incarcerated during the hours spent in the ceramic studio, within the walls of a high-security prison. And now it is dynamic to be pursuing this personal theme, working in Germany in the very year that millions in Europe have succeeded in breaking through the brutally imposed social/political barriers of the past forty years. |
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