I am drawn to spoons; Russian wooden ladles, Balinese horn spoons, brightly coloured Khokhloma painted spoons with berries already nestling inside them like an anticipated feast. Curvy, utilitarian - they are ‘feeders’ but I like making them out of ceramics because the material gives a delicacy and suggests ‘impermanence’ - tap too hard and they are broken. They are hard to make, hard to fire and hard to use without a little accident sneaking in…..but oh so so lovely to hold and taste and drink out of.

Leonard Cohen’s free verse poem captures the spirit of the spoon

“Our instructor made a perfectly symmetrical spoon using purple heart wood, with curves like a woman, always one step ahead of us. Choose your wood. Draw. Draw again and again. Your first idea is never your best. Then gouge out the bowl, saw, whittle, rasp, the tools get finer until at last, after weeks of rubbing coarse and fine over every inch of your spoon, into every cranny, polishing, polishing, he nods that you're ready to oil it. When the unit was completed, he put them in the art case in the entrance to the school with a little card next to each one where he'd calligraphied the maker's name. They shone like trophies.

Of the many objects we made in those classes - ceramic wind chimes, soap stone people, wooden shore birds, we even used styrofoam as a medium - the spoon was the only utilitarian one. Some made the bowl long, the handle short. Every year the instructions were the same, but the results varied widely. Allison was a willow wand of a girl reflected in her svelte, curved spoon. Izzy's fanned out at the end of the handle into a polished scallop. Howard's stout utensil had a large bowl on one end, and smaller one on the other. Mine was a ladle in the shape of a quarter note, which I gave to Doug, the only Buddhist I knew. I made him promise - it was a utilitarian object, and I made him promise he would use it. Stir the sauce, dip the syrup. 

I visited Doug years later. I saw the graying spoon next to the icon on top of a dull book case. I wanted to take this neglected thing back home and put it in my kitchen drawer. Doug, I said, Doug, you promised you'd utilize this utilitarian utensil.

I do, he said, plucking it from its dusty entombment. Waving it around in the air, and then motioning as if spilling something out of it, he said, I use it to pour honey on Buddha.”