Small Homes

It all began with a different conversation, in a different city. I came home from school to find that you had hidden your toy—a small woodland creature, a bushy-tailed squirrel—in the vase I’d made with mum.

Why is it in there, I asked. It’s a little home, you said.

 

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This city is similar to that one. It is built in tiers that rise up from the wide scoop of the bay, angled slightly so that, wherever you go, you always feel that your gaze is being guided back towards the sea. Bakeries, cafés, well paved streets with charming flights of stairs. A perfect seaside town. 

This city is different, too. The apartment blocks are tall and white and gleam with glass. Turn a corner and you find a wooden house that was built three hundred years ago. Craftsmen sell you fabrics dyed with something they extrude from molluscs. Molluscs that they catch by hand. In the mornings I like to sit in the kitchen before the world is up. You can see the fishermen set out with the tide, in boats that look just the same as paintings in the gallery.

 

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They are not that old, she says, looking over my page. The buildings I mean. They replace the wood, the screens, the windows every few decades—some parts sooner. She goes back to the latest plan she’s working on and adds, less to me than to herself, That’s still a kind of beauty. Perseverance. Repetition.

She’ll get no argument from me.

 

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Everyday here is a repetition. Throwing vases in the studio. The same shape, over and again. The daily visit from the master, as she wanders down amongst us like a minor deity emerging from the clouds. The quiet chat with the three other disciples over rice and fish. The solitude of standing on the platform just outside the village, alone.

I’m always heading in the wrong direction it would seem. In the mornings, they commute from villages still huddled in the rolling hillside, in the flourishes of forest, down towards the city like the train lines are a river and they’re caught in a tidal rush, downhill exhilaration. At night they are salmon, skipping home to spawn, while I sit in silence and watch green blur endlessly, then flash into a sudden, brilliant white.

 

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You write, I thought that you liked the repetition. All the rhythmic noises: wheels, pistons, carriage rattles; the way that, every night, there’s something special in the way the moon looks against the sky. 

Well, perhaps I’m saturated.

 

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There’s a café that I visit every weekend. It is one of mine, she said. She tossed her hair. She looked at me. I like the way it feels.

There is something in the wide, wide windows, in the long benches, in the niches for plants that makes you feel like the world is stretching open for you, like there’s room for you to be, to grow. At first I felt a bit ashamed that I couldn’t make friends here. Well, apart from her. 

But in the café I can sit and have the freedom to do nothing, to let my thoughts wander, let myself become a little wild.

 

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At first (if I am honest) I would have preferred to stay out in the village. Once you leave the station—a platform with a small rain shelter—there are just a few streets of old-fashioned houses leading up the slopes of the valley to the master’s studio at the top of the rise.

 But the Foundation says, right there in the application, that they’ll try and pair you with a local artist, artisan, or other. She looked over my shoulder as I wrote and said I like that, I like being an or other.

She is an architect. That much I knew before she collected me from the train station, before we climbed up to the eighth floor of her building, before we stepped inside. She worked for an impressive firm in Amsterdam for some years, and I had already looked into some of the buildings that she had helped to design. Open, light-filled complexes. Wide space. Plants and emptiness. 

When she talks, you understand that she is preoccupied with networks and superstructures, brought together through organic flourishes.

But her apartment doesn’t look as though you’ve stepped into a design. It doesn’t feel like there is a harmony of light and wood.  It’s surprisingly sparse, and when I’m not here I lose the definition of the layout in my mind the way you forget the places you inhabit in your dreams.

 

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She calls herself a mix. Every other word they use for me is small, she says, but a mix is something that draws on two traditions. Like drawing air into your lungs. It can be giddying, expansive. 

She likes that in her buildings too.  Your thoughts dwell in empty space, she tells me as we stare across the rooftops down to the dark bay. In the twilight, it is a wisteria, fading into indigo. When you make a building that gives form to emptiness, she says, that is where possibility exists.

I’m curious. I want to know if she felt like an outsider, growing up like that. Daydreaming of possibility in emptiness. When she isn’t there, I look through her photo albums; I try and catch her face when she thinks I’m occupied. 

 

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Why do you think I’m here?

This city is not my home.

 

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I can’t remember if you were with me the first time I saw the master’s work. It was back in that city, the one I used to call my home. We had driven up the coast and into the wine country, to that little gallery that only sells ceramics. Mum would not relent when I asked to go, so when we went to stay with dad I used our old techniques and he crumbled easily.

Her vases did not look like vases. At first I thought there had been a terrible mistake, that the ownership had changed, because they looked like a row of paua shells, hard abalone surfaces, pitted grey and rough, with an almost liquid centre: glossy, flowing waves of coruscating glaze.

Only closer did you notice that they were a regular and palm-sized shape, in fact you could pick one up and slurp not briny shellfish but refreshing, parsley shaded tea. Once they were within your grasp, you could see the grooving in the stuccoed shells, feel the master’s gentle pressure pinching the lips.

But here’s the thing with vases. Even when the surfaces are interesting, what I really want is to see inside.

 

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You write about diving. You describe the moment when the ocean shelf gives way and the water drops down in gradual gradations from a watermelon green to an inky black.

It draws me down, it’s the absence that I feel calling, the promise of something more.

 

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She asks, What was it for you? I take my time to answer. Something more than wanting to make, I said, though I remember the first time my mother gave me clay. That sense of possibility. Shaping, moulding, then returning to a ball of raw potential.

We lie close together and she tells me how she’s always designed with the smell of wood somewhere in her mind. 

I remember when the builders were working on my parents’ house—back then, I didn’t know what an architect was; I thought the builders designed what they built themselves! She shows me, with open hands, the memory of cuttings, freshly planed-off shavings, small, odd-sized ends. That was when I first began to make, to shape.

 

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I come to her more regularly. I’m not sure of my direction. I am making, but I know that I’m just making shapes, making vessels, and I want something more.

What was it for you, she asks again. 

 

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You are the enemy. That’s a rough translation of the motto that the master fixed at one end of her studio. At first I took it as a simple exhortation to get out of my own way—to stop the thinking and to simply do. That, at least, fits with her school’s philosophy. The other pupils pride themselves on making things that people will use, and we practice not so much by broadening our skills as through honing down the making into muscle memory.

The others see it differently. I’ve noticed it in little things. The way one woman doesn’t wear her earrings anymore. No product in the hair of the quiet, northern man. Emptiness for them means emptying the self.

She smiled at that. Forms want to respond to their surroundings, she tells me over tea the colour of new grass, it’s a process of coaxing the elements together. It comes down to light and lines. I knew what she meant: I can feel the way, sometimes, that the clay coaxes my hands, not the other way around.

 

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You write, I don’t like it when you talk about yourself that way. 

Sometimes I imagine that, in coming here, I’ve managed to escape. At night, though, in the vertigo that leaps between the balls and the hard pads of my feet, I feel like I’ve fallen, like you are watching me cascade from a great height.

You tell me I’ve turned the picture upside down.

I’ve taken flight; I should fly on my own wings.

 

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Today I made a vase that was almost too small to use. It was double bodied, like a bass, a figure eight, but not quite. Something in the angling recalls an ampersand.

I placed it in my palm once I’d finished shaping and thought, this is just two walnuts stacked; this is just a pair of baby’s fists. It’s not a vase—it’s wrong. And I almost brought my hand down, almost crushed it in my palm.

Yu, the other pupil who I feel closest to, turned to me and asked, what would fit inside of that? And I realised, if nothing could fit inside, wasn’t it more of a vessel? Wasn’t it something that could hold pure potential?

The man from the north turned and said, Oh cute. A tiny flower, maybe? My indignation sealed it. I know how men like that use cute to mean trivial. If he was trying to diminish me, it meant I was on to something.

 

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It starts with a promise. You make a piece. You make another, this time one you like and you try it again, only finer, just a fraction slenderer, and then your heart says, why not more? Wouldn't that be even finer—if you could just refine it down to something more essential? 

 

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You would like her, I write, she rises with the dawn. When I see her, it is in profile, looking out the window, watching the first light. 

She found my calligraphy, the different ways I’d tried writing out, small home. She put down her tea, and said, When I first moved to Amsterdam, it was just for study. I thought I would spend my weekends taking cheap trains every direction that I could. I was desperate to seek out the best inspiration. To open up my possibilities.

Well, I got saturated. University caught up. So I spent more time close to home. I made smaller journeys. Walked around the neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the city. That was where I saw the garden. It was late and from the walkway, suspended above the train tracks, you could barely see above the old stone walls. But I could tell that it as something special

 

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It continues as a promise. Some days it requires patience. You build a small mountain out of vases you have hurled down in frustration. Some days it brings joy. It isn’t just a promise that you make to yourself, it’s the promise in the vases. You can feel the potential there. Can you refine it down? Can you find the form?

 

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The neighbourhood had looked run down. Some buildings were unrepaired, and you noticed rusting gates, moss spreading on roofs. Even something wild in the architecture of the place.

But it is nowhere in the rows of bushes or the perfect trees that seem to thrive within the walls behind that house. They obey geometry in strictly human terms: rectangular, symmetrical, no twig out of place. With its marbled tiles and the glimpse of flowing fountain you might think it was a sketch, a renaissance exercise: proportion, balance, perspective. The hint of hidden depths.

She stopped, lips poised, on the verge of saying something more. The sun had risen higher, and her brown face was golden, her eyes downcast. When she sighed, I realised that I had never heard her sigh before. It sounded like her body remembering loneliness. The last train was leaving. I turned away. I left.

 

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For a long time, I was so concerned with finding my form that I didn’t notice the way that the other apprentices came and went, were there and disappeared. They were shadows, often. 

Then I woke with a feeling of rebellion, of restlessness. I changed out of the rough shirt and pants in which I liked to work, into some wide-legged silk pants, the kind that make you feel free, and walked out into the city, winding my way down side streets, behind shops I’d never seen before.

I passed a shop selling charcoal, and I thought, not long ago, this place would have been just like the village, green and wild. It would smell of herbs and rain, between the gusts of salty tang, and now I had the feeling, as I spotted long grass in the alleys, stray cats reclaiming vacant lots, that the wildness survives. It’s waiting to return.

 

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You haven’t written in a while. 

It’s okay. I know that you’re biding your time, too. 

 

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Why do people cling onto this story, she asked in between small handfuls of seeds, That there is a human world, a natural world, and that they are separate? A building is not a line that says, the world ends here. It should invite life inside—

She spreads her arms wide. Swallows glide along her shirt sleeves, take flight from her chest.

 

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Now you start to see your promise. It is visible, like a secret manifest. At first it is just the single vase, the same height and width as the memory of your father’s thumb. The glaze is a celery, smooth and almost matte. Like the first piece, it swells, tapers in, then swells again.

I brought it back to the apartment, left it on the table where we share the sunrise. I watched her as she yawned, saw the small ceramic. You just want to pick it up! She looks at me expectantly. I nod, and she balances it between finger and thumb. You just have to look inside!

She repeats the ritual every day that week. I catch traces of her fingerprints against the soft orange—turmeric and milk; find a glimpse of her reflection in the surface of the vase the colour of dark algae on a river rock. That vase is smaller still. Half the size of my small finger. Each one I bring home is perfectly formed. 

Each empty inside.

 

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She tells me when I least expect it, offering a glass of water with a slice of cucumber and a faint, heartbreaking smile. I kept going back there, she says. Not intentionally, at least not at first. I’d catch trams to other places, or go study some specific site, but I’d find myself passing by the walls again.

It didn’t come to me like some sudden revelation. I don’t even think the view was different that night. But something about the garden must have seeded in me, growing from the gut, spreading underneath my skin. Because as I paused on my way back to the station, leaning down and over the edge of the overbridge, that yearning seized me. I could not turn away.

For one moment I saw myself down below, beside the wall. I watched as the other me approached: it was dark and I nestled my sketch book amongst the weeds. Was that my cardigan I’d hooked across the top of the fence? The darkness started quivering beneath my skin as I saw myself leap over, crouch among the absent leaves, on the perfect, polished floor.

 

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You write, I remember how you cried. You took the night bus from mum’s, lay beside me on my bed. 

I remember your whispered confession; that she told you that you were hollow inside.

 

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The sunlight has faded and in the bay below, the ocean is black. She says, I wish I had never followed her; I wish I was still across the border from that other me. Emptiness is tantalising; we long for that space we can pour ourselves inside.

It all began in another city. Now, the moon catches us in a pure beam of light: two vases, side by side. Two vessels. Two small homes.