David Gary Wright is an artist that makes pots.  As useful forms his cups, bowls, pitchers and teapots live a double life, as they simultaneously feed the body and the spirit.  These pots, which conceived to be used in domestic rituals, also offer invitations to other occasions.  Through their touch and temperature, their weight and gravity, and their symmetries, (which the eye confirms), his pots invite us to engage in what the philosopher Susanne Langer calls the sole purpose of Art - to inform our "life of feeling."

        As a practiced maker of pots, and an Emeritus teacher of makers, I deeply believe that artists making useful pots can embody this duality.  David is such a maker and his pots are connectors between him and their users on many levels. The ways in which they work are phenomenal!  By making the familiar vibrant and the known mysterious, they become acceptable exceptions.  They create and remand contradictions that challenge and transform the ordinary.  Elegant pots that look tipsy yet are totally stable.  Pots with handles that cut the air and please the hand, with spouts that look awkward yet pour in elegant trajectories.  Pots with graceful gestures that move in the mind; as a pitcher that seems to pour untouched.  Bottoms that come to complete rest or even bodies standing on point that are marked and measured by gorgeous surfaces, colors and lines, all become moves (Symbols) which in-form our lives and senses.

David Wright is a modern potter who bases his work on transforming traditional models. They are not about nostalgia or copying nature, but rather they are about what the poet William Carlos Williams calls "imitating nature."  His pots respond to the twentieth century movement begun by Cezanne of placing man in nature as a force for creating form.  His pots in many ways are a search for a private morphology; a species of tableware that can account for the time honored traditions of usage through his need to form working symbols for our future.

All good potters love clay and revere the moves of makers through history that have transformed mud through fire. David is no exception and his pots make endless references to this rich history.  *A slide sheet of David's cups would say more than pages of words about how he makes use of tradition to coax inventions to fit.  His cups are masterful additions to this ancient genre. They are totally useful to the hand and spirit.  They are "new" and fresh.  It always gives me great pleasure when an artist makes pots that reconfirm the wit of our species.  I know of no one who has created so many intelligent ways for a clay volume and coil to become a cup.  They rank with the invention of Mark Pharis' paper template teapots. 

David Wright's pots are of our time (Modern) in other ways. They are like instrumental music, a non-verbal language that gives form to feeling. Like music, they deal with improvisation on a form, say a fugue or sonata.  Like jazz, they move in and out, over and under the familiar to vitalize the present.  I take great delight in this gift of his to re-present and re-form.  David's pots speak to the present and in doing so they call for a kind of open discernment, a willingness to venture on our part that matches his. 

We are in a time when change for change's sake and the pre-natal sound bite make us need to be still and seek in our own time.  So, I wish you pleasure as you are touched by this work and take it as an offering to you to better live your double life of feeling.

William Daley

Artist/Teacher