Welcome back! It occurs to me that I have quite a few new readers on here, so I wanted to take the opportunity to say welcome and thank you. Thank you for signing up to my little newsletter. I will spare you a long introduction into who I am, but know that it means a lot to me that you chose to spend some time indulging me in my obsession with ceramics. I am a ceramic artist myself and also the co-founder of a studio in Berlin where I also teach. I have had it on my mind to find a place where I could research and write about ceramics - from a variety of points of view - and it wasn’t until recently that I worked up the courage to actually do it. I have quite a nice roster of articles coming up (from looking at historical objects to examining the way ceramics are treated in fictional worlds and more). If you like what you read and want to contribute, so that in the future I can spend even more time doing research (and maybe field trips!), I would be so very thankful. Other ways to support me include sharing my articles.
Originally, this post was supposed to be about the meaning behind signing artwork. I was going to look into the origins of the practice, talk about a few prominent examples of ceramic artists who signed their work in ancient times and explore the way the tradition has changed over time.
While doing research, I read about the pots of David Drake, a 19th century slave in Edgefield County in South Carolina. His pots were signed, sometimes with verses, in what is considered as a sign of protest at a time when the smallest act of self-expression was harshly punished. I decided therefore to scrap my original plan. One of the goals of my “Ceramic objects of note” is to discuss important ceramic artefacts that have influenced our history and culture and, in a time where books are being banned in schools and institutions try to cleanse themselves from their past of profiting from slavery, this felt like the right choice.
Makers marks are important for the purpose of identification and authentication. They can also help date the work and place it in a broader historical context.
In this case, marks on a pot mean a lot more than a name: they tell us parts of a story of a human being who was born into slavery and forced to exist and create in a system of unspeakable cruelty. They also tell us about the wider context of the old Edgefield district, where pottery production of functional every-day objects (bowls, jars, cups, etc) reached industrial scales and heavily relied on enslaved labour1. It is estimated that around 76 known enslaved men and women worked in the 12 local potteries until 1865.2
David Drake’s stoneware jars were the biggest to come out of Edgefield and they are attributed to him because they were signed. He mostly signed them simply “Dave”, along with the date, although some also included verses (which we will look at later). As I prepared to write this article, two questions occupied my mind: the first had to do with the way we should address David. This question has occupied other authors too and I feel that it is important to explain my decision. While he did sign his jars with “Dave”, after his emancipation in 1868, he appears as David Drake (Drake was the surname of a previous “owner”)3. I would like to respect the name he chose, even though that in itself is not devoid of injustice.
The second question goes to the way we should perceive the work in front of us. How do we praise work made under coercion?4 We marvel at the size and skills required to create these jars and the courage to sign them. However, these were not works that David decided to make, even though there is agency in the decision to inscribe them with poetic verses and incredible ability, that the system of slavery certainly did not wish to highlight. I do not believe that this question can be answered neatly in an article. David’s work should be admired as it is his creation. He made the decision to mark it and scratch poems and words on these jars, so it is our duty to face them and examine them and not take away these small acts of agency. (It also occurs to me that for someone in my position to write a series called “ceramic objects of note”, it is to put myself in the place of someone who seemingly gets to decide what counts and what doesn’t, which I have no authority or intention to do.)
David’s poems and inscriptions
David Drake specialised in storage jars of incredible size. These jars were made of stoneware clay mixed from locally harvested materials and glazed with alkaline glazes. The firing occurred in so-called “tunnel” kilns (or “groundhog kilns”), wood-fired kilns that were very popular in the south of the United States.5
While he probably threw hundreds if not thousands of them on the wheel, his biggest jars could hold up to 150 litres in contents.
In 1858, David scratched a monumental jar with the poem:
I made this for our sott It will never never, rott
As of 1837, teaching slaves to read or write in South Carolina was illegal. The act of reading or writing itself was met with corporal punishment. So for David to write anything on his jars was a dangerous act. According to Aaron de Groft, David’s protest was not only in the fact that he wrote anything at all, but also in what was written and in the size of his jars.6
It is likely that most of these heavy jars were handled by other slaves, which could also mean that David, with his inscriptions was “creating an audience and teaching slaves to read”7, although that is speculative.
In 1857, David wrote this poem on a jar:
I wonder where is all my relation
Friendship to all -- and every nation
Maybe these words were a lamentation at having lost his wife and children (who were sold away)8, but they also speak to the horror of slavery and to a broader sense of justice that can be applied to other struggles for liberation9.
We do not know for sure what David’s intentions were in writing his poems, but these verses were pockets of personal expressions. They may have been ways to mark his work, forms of creativity, protest or ways to communicate with others. They exist as permanent markings on pieces that were not meant to survive forever. The act of marking clay is inherently an act of intention. The jars produced in Edgefield were meant to have standard sizes and features, but David’s pieces stood out. By defiantly marking his jars, David gave voice to the other enslaved potters whose stories we do not know.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art (NY) - hereafter MET - “Hear me now: the black potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina”, edited by Adrienne Spinozzi, p.35
Jill Beute Koverman, “The Ceramic Works of David Drake, aka, Dave the Potter or Dave the Slave of Edgefield, South Carolina”, 2005, University of South Carolina, p.84
Vincent Brown, “The art of enslaved labor” in “Hear me now: the black potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina”, edited by Adrienne Spinozzi, p.17
Vincent Brown (ibid, p.20-23). He also offers a very engaging debate on this question and about the meaning of art v. craft and whether we can separate work from labor. I will not go into more detail as there is so much more to say, but I encourage you to read it.
For more on this, see Georgeanna H. Greer, Groundhog Kilns-Rectangular American Kilns of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, Northeast Historical Archaeology, Vol. 6, Article 6, 1977. Available at: http://orb.binghamton.edu/neha/vol6/iss1/6
Aaron De Groft, Eloquent Vessels/Poetics of Power, The Heroic Stoneware of "Dave the Potter", Winterthur Portfolio 33:4, p. 254
Ibid, p.255
Vincent Brown, p.25
Michael J. Bramwell and Ethan W.Lasser, “Incidents in the life of an enslaved abolitionist potter written by others” in “Hear me now: the black potters of Old Edgefield, South Carolina”, edited by Adrienne Spinozzi, p.51