Holding Space, chapter 20 from The Works

A Journey in Seeing

A long-term visual memoir by Tineke Storteboom.

Each chapter is published as it is written. Together they form an ongoing book about the development of an artistic practice over nearly four decades.

"The clay was teaching me something paint could not."

After years of painting landscapes that became increasingly quiet, I found myself longing for another kind of silence.

I wanted to work with my hands.

Not with brushes.Not with colour.Just with earth.

Clay slowed everything down.

I worked at the kitchen table while my children played around me. There was no large studio, no grand plan, only small moments in an ordinary day. Pressing, folding, waiting. The work became part of family life instead of existing apart from it.

The bowls emerged from an almost absurd simplicity.

Each one began as a single flat sheet of clay.

Nothing was added.

I simply folded the surface until it discovered its own form.

Before folding the clay, I pressed pieces of lace from my wedding dress into the surface. The delicate relief remained hidden inside, like a private memory carried by every vessel.

When they were fired, I found myself returning again and again to two glazes: a soft celadon green and deep gold. At the time I chose them simply because they felt right. Only years later, after discovering Chinese ceramics and tea culture, did I realise how familiar those colours already were to me.

I did not realise it then, but I was still searching for the same thing I had been searching for in my paintings.

Not the object.

The space it creates.

A bowl is nothing more than an empty volume.

Its purpose is not its walls, but the space they protect.

Perhaps that was why making them felt so deeply healing.

For the first time I wasn't painting space.

I was holding it.

"We shape clay into a vessel; it is the space within that makes it useful."— Laozi, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 11