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Happy New Year! [ hope that everyone had
a good start to the year. I'm reasonably
certain Chat not coo many of us were sitting
at the Three Tenors debacle, wondering if
the yobs besides us had only paid $200 for
their seat instead of $2000. [ spent a good
part of New Year's Eve sitting in a car on
the way back from Kamloops, where | was
stuck for 3 days (which is why che
Newsletter is going out a few days late}. Ir
was a claustrophobic experience, salvaged
only by a trip ro the Kamloops Value
Village. where I spent a happy hour looking
at the pots thac somehow end up there.
There were a few very nice stoneware
reduction pieces with classic speckled
brown glazes. [f anyone out there knows
whe the following mark belongs so, drop me
a line. SS Nk

=

me RCS ee
Speaking of fabulous stoneware, Carhi
Jetterson has a lively and informative article
on the building of her new salt kiln in the
larest issue of Contact Magazine (available
at the Gallery magazine section).

Prior to Christmas, | spenc a couple of very
late nights at my studio. | was tired, sick of
al] my cassettes and chen, as usual, CBC
came through (no, | am not a paid shill for
CBC, just a fanatical admirer), After
midnight the AM station runs a series of
one hour programs from public service radio
stations around the world. Radio
Netherlands and Radio France often have

different cakes on the same news -nuclear
testing in che Pacilic being a prime
example. One night, Radio Netherlands
had an interview with an archaeologist
who was theorizing on the purpose of che
pots chat are found in the ‘Fairy Hills’.
These hills are chambers found in
Neolithic mounds. They have huge stone
post and lintel gateways char lead inco a
room full of hundreds of large, well-
ceafted pots. They are. apparently, the
kind of pots chat only the well-heeled
could afford. The debate currently raging
is as to whether each por represented one
person, with che mound as a mass grave,
or if ic was the equivalent of a stone-age
Bill Gates or Donald Trump buried in
ostentagous splendor

Ac this point | started to imagine the thrill
of excavating one of these chambers,
shining a flash light into a room stacked
high with pots that were over 6000 years
old. £ think it would eclipse my childhood
fantasy of being there when Howard
Carter opened Tutkankamon's comb in
the Valley of the Kings. | wondered abour
the ancient craftspeople of the
Netherlands, were che grave goods the
products of an elite caste within the
potters’ discipline! [f chey lived today,
would they be showing at Garth Clark
galleries. daringly clad in spotless black for
the studio?

The idea of lost cities comtinues tn
fascinate me; knowledge and beauty

covered by the earth, disasters both
natural amd martial, lost stories of
emperors and slaves, About 25 years ago
a friend of my parents gave a slide show
on a starry tropical night (we lived in
Jamaica). He was an American, a marine
biologist who was working for an
underwater laboratory on the North
Coast. He had mysteriously spent much
of the sixties in Vietnam and Cambodia.
The local speculation was chat he
belonged to che CLA. His slides showed
elaborately carved stone. palaces, covered
in vines, rising from jade-green marshes.

Uneil chat moment, I choughe thar such
places existed only in the pages af H.
Rider Haggard and C.5. Lewis. Mast
wonderful of all was the image of him
standing at the base of a giant staircase,
each step bracketed by a pair of clay jars
that must have been § feet high. |
thought that they had to have been made
by giants, a monster race of porters long
since departed from this earth, Since
then, I've watched a man who wasn't
more than five and a half feet tall make a
poe chat was almosc identical in size and
shape. And it still seemed like magic to
mee.

Karen Opas

: Potter’s Guild of B.C. Newsletter

x The Newsletter is published 10 cimes yearly as an information link for members. Submissions of articles, lecvers and
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