Memory of Evolution, 1998

Julia K. Steele

Rachelle Chinnery is a Vancouver, British Columbia based artist. Her coiled and altered vessels, which are the subject of this article, are utterly of this place. Here is a landscape of thickly treed, 4500-foot mountains rising steeply from the ocean shore. A coast battered by wind and rain, inhabited by whales, salmon, bears, cougars, and eagles. This is also a land of giant trees whose ghosts the ocean serves up creating tangles of bull kelp and driftwood on sandstone shelves. Chinnery speaks of this landscape as a geography that penetrates the psyche.

After many years of travel and study abroad, Chinnery has firmly planted herself in the coast of British Columbia. She shares her deep love of this place with her husband and life partner of twelve years. Both their family roots extend back eleven generations in Canada: hers to the earliest French explorers and his to the British and Mic Mac Indian. Together they have explored the ocean by kayak and the coastal mountains on foot for weeks at a time. Chinnery admits that it's "a cliché to say that the natural world moves me to create, but your thinking does change when you spend days on end isolated in nature. Your normal thought patterns are suspended and another level of consciousness takes over. It's like walking around in REM sleep for weeks. That experience can change your life, never mind what it does for the creative process."

The power of the flora and fauna in British Columbia has inspired people to creative expression for millennia. The Coastal Salish, the Kwakuitl and Haida, indigenous peoples of this region, have been informed by the towering cedar and the endless variety of patterning left on beaches by the ebb and flow of the tides. The pieces depicted here are Chinnery's visceral response to such a land and seascape. The vessels evoke driftwood, navels, spines, swirling oceans, whirling wind, beaten coastal trees, intertidal sandstone ledges and fire. Chinnery's broken rim lines and portholes also evoke what lies beyond body and landscape, namely the sky, the very air we breathe.

Sky is an archetypal symbol of spirit, the father, higher mind consciousness (not to be confused with ego consciousness), and enlightenment. The vessels also draw attention to their earthly origins by their rough texture. They flower, burst, branch and flame into rims three or four times the size of their tiny bases. By marrying the elemental (mother earth) with the spiritual, Chinnery's pieces in effect heal the rift between the most troubling of all binary oppositions: body and soul, earth and sky, feminine and masculine.

Chinnery speaks of her work as housing a body consciousness. "Most potters and sculptors of clay have experienced losing control of their bodies through injury. It struck me, in a particularly lengthy episode of back pain, that my body was a separate but absolutely connected aspect of my very thoughts. It seemed the pain I was experiencing was actually a thought pattern- a different level of existence that is possibly more truthful than conscious thought. It occurred to me that my pieces were manifestations of this alternate thought in a very literal way; I stood back and saw female figures throughout the forms. Clay is a particularly sensitive medium that way. It will divulge your thoughts and feelings for you- without your conscious permission or understanding. I suspect the same channel of communication exists between the viewer and the piece: through a channel that bypasses spoken word and conscious thought. "

These vessels, as all clay objects do, signify the hands and soul of the maker. Fingers drag up the spine of the vessel, leaving a wake of ridges, mounds and petrified eddies. Excised walls allow inner and outer worlds to merge. The hands of the maker speak a language that is turned to stone; the story of a body we can never know but of which we each fully are. The pieces point to a truth or knowledge that is beyond the linear workings of our everyday ego-centered minds. Spinoza, the great contemporary of Descartes and the refuter of Cartesian dualism, asserts that we are so much greater than our conscious minds. He points out that ego consciousness can only ever know itself and as such is not capable of knowing or containing anything else. He conceives of a kind of body knowledge or intelligence that various philosophers have gone on to develop into theories as widely varying as Panpsychism (consciousness in every 'thing') and Deep Ecologists (proponents of Gaia-we are all one in that we are part of a single ecology, planet earth).

Descartes' split between mind and body placed supremacy on the mind or ego-consciousness (I think, therefore I am). Cartesian dualism legitimizes and valorizes the part of our minds that separates our self from our body, our fellow beings and our landscapes.

By marrying body, spirit, land/seascape, fire, and air, Chinnery's pieces insist upon the interconnectedness of all. Utterly elemental, through their organic curves and curls and their non-linear reaching out into space, the vases evoke a spiraling testimony to the truth of our being which I believe lies beyond ego-consciousness. Indeed all art stands as a signifier of what is beyond ordinary consciousness. Born from creatures who cannot do without ego, our bodies shape and create objects of beauty which are windows to the world we know by instinct exists, but of which we can barely speak. Really we are best mutely pointing to it by physically bringing beauty into being. If the writing itself is beautiful and topples over into an aesthetic experience for the reader, then at this point the writing mirrors the experience of seeing the piece. Ultimately, writing embodies nothing. By its very failure to say the unsayable it says everything worth saying.

This is a round about way of admitting that Rachelle Chinnery's pieces leave me spell bound and tongue-tied. Their portholes and flaming, swirling rim lines break the model of a traditional vessel. Their rim lines fling free the sky and invite it into the very heart of the vessel. Chinnery's raw and organic finishes draw attention to the pieces' earthly origins and insist that the viewer take into account that the vase is made of clay-the origin of all life. By picking up the striking features of her local landscape, the shear beauty of her vessels is testimonial to Chinnery's observation that "our geographical connectedness is in loving where we are." It is through substance and form that Chinnery performs her alchemy. By drawing upon all the elements-air, earth, fire and water-Chinnery, the maker provides the world with objects that embody a feeling of wholeness and interconnectedness with all things.

Julia Steele is a writer and potter living in Vancouver.