SARAH SHELTON, MS, LPC-S

Sarah Shelton has been a practicing therapist for the past fifteen years and is a training candidate with the Inter-Regional Society of Jungian analysts. During the training process, she became interested in alternative firing techniques and their resonance with the metaphor of alchemy and emergent theory, and is currently writing her thesis on this topic. She enjoys the rich interplay between the various communities she belongs to which combine her interests in ceramics, music, philosophy, gardening, and Jungian studies. She maintains a private practice (located above a ceramic studio) with a Jungian focus in New Orleans, where she lives with her husband, two cats, three dogs, and many plants.

Alchemical Stones
(Barrel Fired Ceramics) 

Alchemy has become an important metaphor for me both as a clinician and as an artist-experimenter, since it reveals the interplay between participants when they assemble, be they humans, animals, plants, or materials. In my therapeutic practice, the mixture between two people who are receptive to the transformation process can be life changing. In a parallel fashion, my artistic experiments have highlighted the interconnectedness embedded in the creative act. In fact, the entire process of creating this assemblage of vessels has been a study in mixtures and what emerges out of them.

I worked outside on the porch, listening to the wind in the trees, bird song, distant lawn mowers—sounds of life going on around me. In this reverie, I meandered through memories, hopes, curiosities. I thought about the yard while I sat in it—how several plants growing had been planted there by birds, how the vegetation created a habitat for the bugs, spiders, and toads who were all carrying on their life uninterested in me (provided I didn’t disturb them), each one contributing to the phenomenon of yard.

All the while, these pots were created not just out of the movements of my hands, or the allowances of the clay, but were also shaped by my reveries and the assemblage of the yard and neighborhood around me. The pots were just material instantiations of the whole experience.

The barrel firing itself reflected the spirit which permeated the whole project. In the firing process, the pots were placed in a kiln (a big metal box which I commissioned from my neighbor, a welder), which was then filled with combustible material and various “colorants,” i.e., substances that, when burned, infuse the pots with colored patterns. In this case, I used salt, copper mesh, coffee grounds, and eggshells. Using the language of alchemy, these materials evoked eros, energy, and fertility. Though I added these materials instinctively, I feel they are important aspects of interconnectivity. There is very little control over what kinds of patterns emerge. I can determine what goes in the kiln, the way the materials are placed in there, and, to a certain extent, the air flow and length of time the pots are in, but how the materials interact once the fire is lit is entirely out of my hands.

The pots that emerge from the firing embody a co-created event involving attunement and communication between myself, my environment, and the materials. As my relationship to the materials deepened, their symbolic meaning also emerged, making the stone-like shapes truly alchemical stones—something more than just material, but also a vehicle for a new understanding of myself and my relationship to the world around me. These “stones” then, belong in relationship—they are not isolated lone objects, but embedded in a context and a community. The arrangement of the piece is meant to evoke the image of a dialogue, and to highlight the “something more than” that arises when parts come together to form a meaningful whole.