Have you ever dared to touch a painting, print, or sculpture? Yet, how many pots have you lifted to check the heft? I went to the Empty Bowls fund-raiser in our area recently; the event was a wonderful exercise in pot fondling. Luckily, we had sinks in which to wash our bowls before we went for soup. Yes, it was important to myself and others that our bowl be pleasing to look at, but everyone needed to feel their bowl to be thoroughly satisfied that it was the right one. At first, we would look at bowls casually, but once the examination became intense, the bowls had to be held to be assessed.

I believe that pottery is meant to be held, to be lifted and put down countless times during its useful life. As pottery is found in almost every culture and historical period, potsherds are used to date ancient cultures, to define time and place; the same humble usefulness is also why I enjoy being a potter.

Touch is the one sensation that creates a most superior interaction with a piece of art, utilitarian or otherwise. In fact, I would argue that it is the ultimate satisfaction brought about by touch that elevates the common bowl to the status of a piece of art — bright shiny glazes and form alone won't do it. However, touch is not an element that most art critics include in their repertoire of aesthetic judgments. They do, however acknowledge that texture is an important dimensional element — I suppose because it creates more vividly the illusion of substance and depth.

Recently someone on ClayArt, an Internet mailing list, brought up their dissatisfaction over the "jazzy surfaces" that constantly beleaguer the readers of Ceramics Monthly and other such pottery-aggrandizing glossy magazines. Watching the parade of pots and potters go by month after month, I have to agree. Without the tactile experience, pottery is reduced to a structured canvas of clay on which to paint. No wonder the "painterly" potters are the ones whose work makes it into the 2D color magazines.

Don't get me wrong. I like paint. I like color. More, I like the significance of touch. Texture, in all it's variety, is what gives depth and meaning to a piece of art. Most importantly, touch is what informs us that reality is what it appears to be.

Touch is the essential barometer of our senses. It is the first of the senses to evolve and the last to leave us. Images in the head are nothing but that — not only are they distinct and separate from our bodies and therefore our selves, but if we wish, we can manipulate those images and assign a meaning (think of cloud gazing, searching for faces in rocks, etc.). Erich Harth in "The Creative Loop" describes how we have a feedback loop in our perceptive minds that allows us to manipulate what we see to create meaning. If we are on a Cartesian stage watching images float by, where is reality?

To establish reality, we rely on our most intimate sense, touch. It is what places us in the real moment, what gives the experience of an object it's richness. Touch is the one sense which is available throughout the body, unrestricted by organ, encompassing our skin, our muscles, even our bones.

Touch heals us; touch teaches us. More and more researchers are finding that the absence of physical contact creates serious personality dysfunction. Consider this: the largest area of our brain surface is devoted to the human hand. As artists, we transmit our feelings into our works through our hands. That single caress exemplifies all that art is and all it wishes to be.

In her book on the rise and development of the human mind, Susanne K. Langer speaks to how this physical interaction with art allows for a greater emotional response. In an essay on the development of the human mind, she addresses primitive versus modern thought, "the motivational conception of events expresses, by its formulation of them, the act of conceiving them; the product of thinking reflects the basic pattern of the thinking process itself, much as the living body, the product of growth, expresses the dynamics of the physiological acts of growing. That is why the act form is the natural form for primitive conception of events to take, and as such it governs the immediate perceptions as well as the imagination of people who have not originated or received the causal perspective."

I think Langer's statement should be reexamined as an opportunity to view the motivational conception of events as being equally necessary to our responses as a causal conception of events. The human need (when viewed not as an evolutionary process where causal is better, but as simply part of a human pattern of interpretation), is to interact with a creation in three ways: physically through touch, psychologically through emotional response, and causally by intellectual analysis. It does not really matter in what order these interactions are performed either when creating or interacting with an object; all are equally important. In our causal culture, however, we have placed a tremendous amount of importance on viewing things from afar, and interacting with "distant" art from a distance. This can be extrapolated to other forms of visual art — movies, television and the Internet. As we push ourselves farther and farther away from the actual person, event or object that we seek to interact with, we become less and less sure of the basis upon which reality rests, and we have more room to manipulate that reality to our own standards.

Recently I went to the Freer Gallery in Washington, DC. I wanted to wander through the collection and fondle some pots. I'm not ashamed to admit, it was an intensely moving experience. I sat down first with this huge 2 foot behemoth — a monster of a pot over 5,000 years old. Older than the government, older than Christ, older than anything I have ever interacted with before.

That is what I was allowed to do: fully interact with it. I held it, I put my hands inside it, my fingers found a place where the potter's fingers had shaped the clay. They found the place where an inclusion had blown out, leaving a small hole in the wall of the pot.

Then I looked at a few pots from the Zhou Period (approximately 770 - 300 B.C.). It was a time when potters in part of China were just learning that they could make a pottery wheel, but for the most part they were still pinching and coiling, then paddling their pots. Glaze hadn't been invented yet, although painted slips on burnished surfaces were definitely present. Texture was very important on these pots. Of course, it was the use of the pot that dictated the areas of smooth and rough. Moreover, the size determined what kind of texturing was used. Most pots were formed with a smooth interior and lip and a contrasting textured body. These contrasts make a wonderful combination. The paddles they used were carved with crosshatching leaving impressions that look like fabric. The smallest pots had the finest, most exquisitely fine fabric-like texturing all over them. Round and delicate, they fit easily into both hands.

I imagined drinking out of such a cup. Now that I could touch these ancient pots rather than just view them, their uses came into focus for the first time. Perhaps touch is why they began turning just the lip on the wheel. A paddled lip is unpleasant to use — warped and bumpy. However, a paddled body is wonderful to hold, full of excitement and interest for the hands (and I'm thinking they were cold hands, probably warming themselves around a big bowl of tea like I do in my drafty house).

If the examples in the Freer Gallery are any indication, the early wheel thrown pots are h-e-a-v-y, especially around the bottom. Looking at them behind the museum glass, you can't gauge that bit of character. Once held, however, one knows them for what they are; these pots are awkward and unbalanced, like our own first attempts at the wheel — heavy, clumsy, and very small. These ancient wheel-thrown pots try to be beautiful but do not quite succeed, a conclusion one can reach only by touch.

I think the quietest and yet most alluring moment was holding the very last pot, where the potter had created a piece so thin and light with paddled texture that he had to put an extra coil inside the rim to reinforce it for daily use. The coil must have been very soft, for as I reached my fingertips inside the cup, I could feel the fingerprint whorls, my own fingers fitting in almost precisely in the same gesture as I imagined pressing a coil in the same spot. I was making contact with a kindred spirit generations and hundreds of years past. Our same kinetic act — touch — engendered a feeling of understanding.

Exploring art this way lends a whole new meaning to "reach out and touch someone" don't you think? I think this is what excites me most about working in clay, this humble excrescence of earth, this malleable silt. At the most basic, there are only fingertips and clay at the site of creation. So simple and yet we could be creating the world itself instead of a pot. Like Khnum, the ram-headed potter god of Egypt, we create ourselves with each turn of the wheel, every time our fingers interact with clay. Shaping and reshaping. Saying the same thing over and over and hoping to express it the way we imagined it, through the use of our hands.