It felt like we have been at a ceramic convention. The who’s-who of the pottery scene in Puducherry and Auroville have been current, as have been Golden Bridge Pottery college students, ex-students, workers and ex-staff. (Should have taken a group picture!)
ALSO READ Puducherry’s Golden Bridge Pottery co-founder Deborah Smith passes away
Only, this was on the Sri Aurobindo Ashram cemetery in Muthialpet. We had come to bid our farewells to a particular somebody. As a heady aroma of flowers and incense crammed the air, they constructed a brick kiln round our Debby, who was wearing a fairly white frock, trying like translucent porcelain, serene and at peace… and I promise I noticed her fleeting, embarrassed smile for a fraction of a second on the fuss round her.
Deborah with companion Ray Meeker at one among his exhibitions
| Photo Credit:
Adil Writer
Soon a slurry of crimson clay and straw signalled the enterprise we had come over for. Quietly, she went up with the perfume of jasmine and the warmth of casuarina wooden, her gasoline of alternative for her manufacturing firings. The irony of the scenario was not misplaced on the clutch of dewy-eyed potters current; what a stunning method for a potter to maneuver to a different realm.
Student of Japan
Deborah Smith as soon as mentioned to me, “The flower-power, hippie culture of Haight-Ashbury somehow bypassed me. I never even wore flowers in my hair till I reached South India!” Instead, she graduated in Japanese language at Stanford University, the place, in 1967, she met Ray Meeker within the ceramics division of USC. She had simply spent two years in Japan finding out pottery-making and apprenticing with grasp potter Yamamoto Toshu in Bizen. She was now, once more, heading to Japan as an interpreter to Susan Peterson, who was researching her e-book on Japan’s National Living Treasure, Hamada Shoji.
Deborah’s arabesque tableware
| Photo Credit:
IRENO GUERCI
In 1971, a route from Mashiko led her to the Coromandel Coast of India, to Puducherry’s Sri Aurobindo Ashram. An Ashram secretary, upon listening to of her ceramic background, requested if she can be all in favour of beginning a pottery workshop for them. “Yes,” she mentioned, “if my friend comes and agrees to build a kiln.” The buddy, Ray, arrived a few months later, and the remaining, as we are saying, is a melee of historical past and folklore.
Ray and Deborah had found in one another a obscure curiosity within the philosophy of the East, not unusual within the period of the Beatles and Ravi Shankar. What started as a 200 sq. toes thatch-shed on a “lucky spot” assigned to them by the Mother on the Ashram, has at the moment grown into a legacy. Golden Bridge Pottery acquired its title from a line from Sri Aurobindo‘s epic poem, Savitri, describing the Divine Mother:
“She is the golden bridge, the wonderful fire,
The luminous heart of the Unknown is she.”
Ray and Deborah have literally started a culture of stoneware ceramics in a hinterland known only for its local red-clay and terracotta. Once the production of stoneware pottery started in earnest, Ray began taking on students who were clamouring to learn the craft. In 1987, he put down his pottery tools to rediscover the architect in him; South India is dotted with his fire-stabilised mud houses. Since then, Deborah had carried on refining the wood-fired ceramics Golden Bridge Pottery (GBP as we know it) is famous for and that has become a benchmark in quality functional handmade tableware in India. All the works coming out of the studio, hand-painted by her: family heirlooms and collectables today.
At daybreak, when Deb’s ashes are assigned to the ocean. A subdued sky with delicate brush-strokes as if painted by Deborah herself letting a pale solar peep by because it greeted her into the golden realm, her new abode.
| Photo Credit:
Dharmesh Jadeja
Debby’s classes
Although she was not our “official” trainer at GBP (Ray had that mantle), a number of of us keep in mind her quiet observations and ideas over two tea breaks through the day, as we learnt the methods of clay. Nearly 25 years later, each time I make a teapot spout, each time I pull a mug deal with, each time I trim a vase’s foot, I consider Debby’s ideas. She even taught me how you can pack a pot, telling me, “If you don’t know how to pack a pot for transportation, you might as well not make the pot. The client doesn’t want to receive elements of tile-mosaic.” Point famous Deb. Amen.
Today, college students of Golden Bridge Pottery are everywhere in the map of up to date ceramics. As necessary as that’s the neighborhood of studio potters that has grown within the villages and cities round GBP. Auroville, a world neighborhood exterior Puducherry, and its bio area, itself boasts of over 30 studio potters recognized for every thing from purposeful to sculptural ceramics, sometimes called “Pondicherry Pottery”. The magnitude of this unfold of craft and data hit me within the intestine a couple of years in the past, once I was making a film, Golden Bridges, to display on the 50th Congress of the International Academy of Ceramics in Geneva. The outpouring of gratitude, respect and love for GBP from all quarters I used to be interviewing, was an emotional rollercoaster.
Today, Ray carries on making his monumental sculptures. The swansong exhibition that he has been threatening us with is, fortunately, nowhere in sight. Deborah gave up actively taking part on the studio in 2019, deciding to take the time to pen her memoirs. She met her date with jasmine garlands, incense and casuarina cut-offs on July 21, 2023.
Our Golden Bridge Pottery is in a state of flux. Let us see what tomorrow brings.
The author is a Puducherry-based multimedia artist working with clay as his medium of alternative.
