Negative capability: clay and care

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For many school-aged children in Australia, making a clay pot is their first, formative experience of sculpture, of encountering a material and its latent potential, of navigating process. But even without this encounter, we have a mimetic relationship to pots. We know a pot can be hand-made, and what a hand-made pot is. When we touch a pot, we can imagine that after the maker's hands, ours are the next hands to touch it. In fact, we feel we’re meant to touch it. For some, this relationship takes on an added layer of mimesis: we want to own the pot, bring it into our homes and place it somewhere, and in doing so further that creative act of formation through the act of choosing.

We have met many of our needs through forming clay into an object and learning from its capability. With ceramics we have prepared and stored food, created materials for shelter (bricks, pipes, floor and roof tiles), and sought to protect ourselves from our most unruly, violent, and destructive tendencies and inventions (brake-discs, armoured vests and vehicles, radiation-proof cladding). We have so frequently used ceramic as a form of containment that functionality has become one of its most predominant associations.

Natalie’s ceramics, as much as they resemble containers, can never be properly useful. While they may appear functional, there will always be something that prevents you from doing something with them. Some objects are a little too tall. Some are a little uncentred, as if they would fall if asked to hold something. And there is often a sly, subversive hole in the base. These are objects that may be receptive, but they are also porous. They can allow things in, and they can allow things out.

This paradox of containment and openness has a parallel in psychoanalysis. Analysts practice staying open to the world of their client, to be curious and not closed oM, to be, as Adam Phillips describes it, ‘present without being purposeful’. It is a form of care built on respect for the very meaningfulness of another person’s experience; you cannot be open to the idiosyncrasies and nuances of another’s pains and hopes if you are too full of your own. The psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion adopted and augmented a phrase originally coined by Keats to describe this dynamic: negative capability. For Keats it described an artist’s capacity to let go of “reason” in the pursuit of art. For Bion, it became the ability to sit with not-knowing, with the acute discomfort of ambiguity.

As with pots, many of us have a mimetic relationship to caring for others. We know how to care because we have been cared for. We touch because we have been touched, we advise because we have been advised, we feed because we have been fed, we correct because we too were once corrected. We rarely stop to think about the usefulness of our model of care, let alone whether it is as all-powerful as we may expect, and whether it may stop us from seeing what is genuinely new about the need in front of us.

These pots are shapeshifters, foils, negative capability. With them Natalie has re-made the past and been curious about the present, subtly, slowly, being led by the material in front of her. In some of them we find a quiet emptying of oneself, in others a turning upside down of how things should work and how quickly. In the negative spaces we might see how our fantasies of omnipotence sometimes mirror our anxieties about our powerlessness. In the pair inclined towards each other, so close and yet not touching, we may sense the power of individuation to bring us together. We might see how a different relationship to the other is possible.

Mikhaela Rodwell