Okay.

The honorary artist of the year is Dick Lehmann.

Thank you so much for joining me.

And you know, Clay, art is your specialty in clay.

Art has really been around for 400,000 years, right?

And I love that you moved into this pieces of kind of the fossil, really.

It kind of brings it back to the original purpose of what Clay art was.

Yeah.

And it also acknowledges that sometimes we discover by failing.

This whole process was discovered when I was doing American Raku.

And, that's a process of healing things quickly, taking them out red hot and putting them in combustible materials.

Okay.

I did that with a Canadian potter and we said, look, we've got this many pieces this few days, we're going to get them all done, right?

Yeah.

Well, you know, tempt fate.

What happens?

We had a tornado.

Tornado touched down about one mile away.

The northeast winds blew the hot pot down a hill into some grasses.

And the cover, the metal cover a block away.

Phil went after the cover.

I retrieved the pot.

We covered it.

We sat there holding it down in the rain.

But when it cooled, there were images of the grasses and pots that it made it in.

And that was the beginning of an idea that started me on this.

Well, is this the pot that was in the tornado?

This is not me thought I was going to say, but do you have that one on display in your home?

Yeah.

So it allows me to, to create what kind of fast fossils we had some.

What a cool idea.

We had some folks from Notre Dame stopped by.

They were at a conference, and they said, now what?

What are you doing here?

And I explained the process.

So let me tell you what you're really doing.

You're making fast fossils.

The vegetation is turning to activated charcoal.

It's releasing a film of carbon.

And you're collecting the film of carbon in the form of an image in the pot.

And so this is something I've done for the last 35 years, and I come back to it occasionally.

I have just three, but these will be coming with me to the show.

They will be available, I love it.

How long have you been doing, Claire?

40.

Well, since the 1976 76.

A long time you've been doing it.

You've really mastered it.

And I love that you have created so many unique concepts from that time.

Well, I would say not mastered because the process itself keeps leaving me to new things.

Okay.

I mean, one of the oldest ways of working with, clay is, is wood firing.

Okay.

But I'm I'm doing some long firings.

I designed the kiln that I could fire for 15 days.

12 days by myself.

And that was by building a huge firebox on the kiln and feeding it just five times a day, filling it up.

Breakfast.

I ran home from lunch.

This is commitment.

Supper before I went to bed.

Once during the night.

And those pots?

This was sitting on a crown of shells.

So the drip that you see coming off the bottom was actually on the bottom.

This is all the ash from the from the fuel.

Different trees absorb different kind of, soluble and, and soluble minerals through their enzyme work.

And so this was the Chinese elm that gave this kind of ash on the piece.

And like I used to do a lot of that, I don't have my own kill anymore.

So I worked as a guest.

But let me show you what the most recent work is.

All right.

Let's go see it.

Now.

These are eye catching.

I mean, this draws you in your artwork here.

So these pieces, have three glazes on them.

And I was very interested to see what an accumulation of more than one glaze on a pot might do.

Of course, more is better for me.

Can never say too much.

Right?

Well, yeah.

I mean, I started out with, less is more.

What do you get?

So many artists start with that kind of concept.

And I tried more with less.

Okay, now I'm just saying more is more.

More is more I love it.

I love that concept.

So these these pots, have as many as ten different glazes on them.

And I'm relearning to see beauty.

I think this is some of my best work.

But as a student, my professor might have said, oh, you have a crawling problem.

You need to fix that.

To my way of thinking, this is really lovely.

Did you add that or is that just part of the process?

That's part of the process.

I have a glaze that will start to pull apart before it melts, and I use that intentionally.

So I'm actually designing glazes to do these things that I was taught I should never do.

But in that I think is where you can see the beauty.

I hope that the folks who come to the art fair will bring a new set of eyes and set aside all their assumptions about beauty, and approach these things as a way of being introduced to beauty in a way that they may never have seen before.

I love that now when you're putting them into the kiln, because I see over here you have some parts that are ready to go in.

Yes.

And they look perfectly shapes.

Yeah.

Perfectly smooth.

Right.

So how does that transfer into what we see here on your shelves?

Well, a perfectly smooth pot would have been like this, but the accumulation of all those glazes creates a thickness and actually a weight that, you might not initially expect.

Other pots.

I'm actually purposely, purposely, altering so that they have places for the glaze to catch.

Yeah.

So these go in looking this altered form.

But really covered with many, many glazes to make something new.

Yeah, I love it, I love it.

So you've been doing this a long time.

Talk to us about, you know, watching the up and rising clay artists coming into these roles.

What kind of lesson might you offer to them?

Well, make a lot of pots because it's in the making that you discover and the clay will lead you into some, some new work.

I was just speaking with a clay artist this morning.

Came over for coffee.

He said, you know, I I'm trying cone three wood firing.

But it's it's a lot of losses.

And what I have to focus on is that piece in the back that cracked.

I need to pick it up.

And I say, oh, look what happened here.

If I could make that happen all over the pot.

That's that's kind of what has happened here from triple glazing.

What would happen if I put more than three glazes on.

So now some of these have up to ten.

And I just keep making discoveries.

I feel like my own visual literacy is being expanded by the work itself.

And that's an exciting place.

It is, it is.

And you're pulling from your experiences as well.

Right?

Exactly.

Have you done a lot of your training?

A lot of it stateside.

But I've had a significant amount of time in Japan, working, exhibiting and learning from the, the clay artists in Japan.

Well, we're learning how beautiful your art is.

I'm so glad that you are, you know, honored this year.

Just wonderful stuff.

I have to ask you one more question.

Is it usable?

Can I use the coffee cup to drink coffee with everything?

Is fully functional.

If you want to put it in the dishwasher, you may be just fine.

Yeah, so be on that one.

All right.

Thank you so much.

You sure?

You head over to For the Love of Art.

First you can purchase and see some of his beautiful pieces.