Pottery Meets Heraldry

1 August 2021

My pottery shows often grow from an image that strikes in the middle of the night. This time it was the realization that bowls look like inverted shields. The thought captivated me: picture a medieval hall decorated with heraldic shields, each one turned inside-out as a serving bowl. Immediately I woke my friend Leah to tell her about it. On the basis of long friendship and a history of pottery-writing collaborations, she heard me out.

We agreed it seemed a promising riff on swords into plowshares. As we talked, it turned into an inversion of Constantine’s story as well. Go back in time with me for just a second: in 312 AD, Constantine was marching to battle his rival for possession of Rome. Around noon he saw a cross of light in the sky above the sun, and he heard a voice saying, “In this sign conquer.” So Constantine made a cross out of gilded spears. His soldiers inscribed the symbol on their shields. Then Constantine defeated his enemy, successfully launching his own empire and the fraught entanglement of cross and sword. 

We wanted to tell a different story with our shield-bowls. It was past midnight, but we pulled out a mini whiteboard to scribble out our shared knowledge of icons and cathedrals. The pelican that wounds herself to feed her young. The phoenix rising in a blaze of resurrection. The peacock for immortality, and the holly and ivy for Incarnation. Leah and I filled the whiteboard with image ideas before we remembered that neither of us can draw.

Fortunately, our friend Deirdre can. When she called to ask if she could do anything for the show, I appointed her Chief of Heraldry. Within twenty-four hours, she was sending us texts of shield shapes and provenance, color combinations and meanings, and Ogham signs for trees and their symbolic properties. 

I threw the bowls and painted them with underglaze, and then Deirdre joined me at the studio for an intense weekend of carving. We more or less forgot to eat, but there were nine heraldic bowls to show at the end of it. We had serious reservations about the pelican—the rim was damaged early in the carving process, and though I did all I could to repair it, clay has memory and I suspected that in the firings it would remember the break. We finished carving it anyway. To everyone’s surprise, it mended in the fire. 

         

Detail on the Pelican chicks.

I know you’re supposed to let the art speak for itself, but we’re in the world of heraldry where everything means something by rules older than our own. I feel compelled to let you know that the sable background signifies constancy and grief while white or argent signals peace. Combined, they mean “most fair,” as the One who had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him is also the Desired of the nations. The border of yew speaks of death and the chevron above the pelican means protection. 

The self-wounded pelican has been a symbol for Christ since the 2nd century, when an anonymous Alexandrian read ancient zoology in light of the Passion. The mother pelican was thought to pierce her own breast in times of famine. Some thought the blood kept her young alive, while others said it could even raise the dead.

It’s not an image to win a war, to rout enemies or secure the throne. But it nestles in French cathedrals and the mosaics of the Holy Sepulcher. It broods in the collaboration of three friends, feeling their way toward the self-giving love of the Prince of Peace.  

In this sign, conquer.  

The pelican bowl and its larger series is part of a show which will be on display at Indianapolis’s Harrison Center for the Arts beginning this Friday, August 6.