From the Carleton College Voice, Summer 2010
Photographs and interviews by John Noltner
Edited by Teresa Scalzo
In early 2009 Minneapolis photographer and frequent Voice contributor John Noltner began a documentary project that explores the meaning of peace through art and storytelling. Titled “A Peace of My Mind,” the project asks people simply: What does peace mean in your life? How do you work toward it? What obstacles have you encountered along the way?
To date, Noltner has interviewed and photographed more than 50 people from diverse backgrounds nationwide. Here we present excerpts of seven of his nine interviews with Carleton alumni, students, and faculty and staff members.
“Too often we focus on the things that separate us in this world, whether that is politics, religion, or ethnicity,” says Noltner. “ ‘A Peace of My Mind’ asks us to consider the common humanity that connects us all.”
“As a culture, we have a skewed idea about the worth of things, about value. We say the most expensive thing is the best thing. Or the bigger thing is the best thing. To me it’s the relationship between you and the object that is more valuable.”
My name is Kelly Connole, and I’m an assistant professor at Carleton College. I teach ceramics and metalsmithing. I guess the first things I identify as are an artist and a teacher and an avid gardener.
The Empty Bowls project is something that we’ve done at Carleton for six years, and it’s certainly not a Carleton-specific program. Empty Bowls was started about 20 years ago by a high school teacher in Michigan who wanted to help his students understand food scarcity in America. So he began a project of making bowls with his students and then having a meal served in those bowls, and participants could take away the bowl as a reminder of the empty bowls in the world. The ceramics community is a fairly small community, so at our national conference this teacher talked about his experience and it just took off.
Now Empty Bowls is an official 501(c)(3) non-profit, and it’s pretty remarkable in that schools, communities of artists, hobbyists, all sorts of people have Empty Bowls all over the country, and I think even internationally. You can use the term “Empty Bowls” with your project as long as the money goes to fight hunger, whether that’s at a local level or a national or international level, and so we created Empty Bowls at Carleton.
The first year was a very small project. We raised just about $500 and sold maybe 50 bowls. Now the project is actually quite large. We raise about $5,000 each year. The students and I create about 550 bowls. We invited the interest houses on campus to make soup. We collaborate with local bakeries and Bon Appétit, the food service provider at Carleton, to create a very simple meal that we have on a Friday in May. We usually sell out our 500-some bowls, and participants are asked to make a donation in the amount of their choosing towards the project.
It’s something that I’ve worked into my class as a way of looking at our local communities, of thinking a lot about Northfield. It’s very easy to think that Northfield wouldn’t have hunger issues. It’s a pretty affluent, comfortable community in a lot of ways, but I think that in Rice County, and even within Northfield, there’s a real need. Eespecially now—Food Shelf usage is up about 200 percent this year over last, I believe. So we talk a lot about our local community.
The project is really tied to the academic interests in my class, in that most of the ceramic objects made in the world are made in community. The idea of one individual artist, a genius artist, alone in their studio making things is a very new concept in ceramics. Typically potters made work—whether on wheels or in hand-building techniques—in a collaborative studio setting. I think that the nature of clay lends itself very well to community, to forming communities and really strengthening them.
So the students and I make the bowls in unison. One person might throw the bowl, another person might trim it, another person loads it in the kiln, another person glazes it, another person sands the bottom, another person makes the soup, and so, really, all of the bowls of soup are owned by none of us and by all of us. Thinking a lot about that relationship to ceramic history, I guess I would say the project lends itself very much to my ideas about peace. For me in my life, clay has taught me about generosity in a way that nothing else has, and that’s so much a part of Empty Bowls means, that if you have a skill, you can use that skill to be generous. Using materials from the earth to be generous is important to me.
After I read about the “Peace of My Mind” project, I think my initial thoughts were about harmony and the lack of violence. I think the next wave of thought was more on a personal level in thinking about peace as a lack of frantic movement. As I get older I realize how important it is to be still, and so thinking about peace in terms of simplicity or silence or stillness is really important. I think as a teacher I always worry that I sound like a corny artist, but I really believe that if I can help the world in any way, it’s to teach students to be absolutely present. To me that is, in many ways, being at peace—to be completely present at what you’re doing. And I think that now (and I’m guilty of it as well) with iPhones and everyone having their own headphones on, it’s very easy to be in too many places at once. I think that for me, whether it’s in working with clay or working in my garden or brushing my cat or whatever it is, if I can be absolutely present in that moment, that that’s the closest thing I understand to peace.
When I started working with clay, I was pretty young. I was 19 and it was a tumultuous time in my life. I think being 19 is a hard time in a lot of people’s lives. I remember vividly the night that I stayed up all night long working on a soup tureen project in college, and the clay allowed me to understand how far you could push something before it could not hold its shape. Okay, so that’s just the nature of ceramic, but what that taught me in my life is that all things are like that. Through working with clay, I’ve learned how you can work with the material in a way that makes sense to that material, and so it taught me a lot about how to interact with other people, of figuring out, “Well, this is a person who doesn’t have any of the same value system that I do, but we’ve got to have something in common. We’ve got to have something that we could work on together.” And so, with every different kind of ceramic material I think you find that place that you can work together.
I also think clay is incredibly forgiving. In the ceramic world, we talk a lot about ceramics memory— you can manipulate clay in a certain way and then do something else to it, but the particles themselves have a memory and they’ll revert back to the original shape. So, I think, “Oh, that’s really pertinent he to life as well,” that people have a memory and although you can relearn something or you can say you’re sorry, there’s also a memory that hangs on. And so, I think that was really pertinent to my life as well.
I think that the tactile nature of clay—that clay immediately accepts any information that you put into it, whether that’s your finger marks or tool marks—that clay is completely receptive. And, again, I think that that translates really well to humans as well. Information that a student discovers as opposed to being told is remembered at a different level, it impacts at a different level. So, as a teacher, I think the best thing that I can do is put clay in front of students and give them skills, hopefully, that help them discover clay.
I don’t expect that everyone will have the same sort of relationship with clay that I’ve had, but I hope that they have that with something. Because, to me, the whole world started to make a bit more sense when I could understand how to work with a material that is so connected to the earth. I mean, it is earth, and so the path of figuring out how I’m connected to something so much larger than myself is a very direct path with clay.
The things that I do in my life—I don’t know if they help me achieve any kind of peace, but they certainly help me get closer. I work in my studio and I know that I am a better person when I’m working with my hands—I sleep better, I’m more interested in other people, and I’m more interested in the world. I just feel better when I’m engaged in something that occupies my mind. I’m not an athlete, but I think athletes sometimes talk about getting into a zone where they’re completely focused on what they’re doing, whether it’s running or playing some sort of sport. Art does that same thing for me. I get to a spot where my mind is so focused on the task at hand that somehow other things are released in a way that’s very difficult for me to put into words. It’s like a physical, intellectual, emotional experience that, for me, language doesn’t really capture.
I’m also a member of Open Hands Farm just north of Northfield, and being a part of that farm has allowed me to reconnect with my very rural upbringing. (I was raised in rural Montana.) Some days the farmers and I will just look at the earth and see how many species we might find in that little piece of earth, and, again, I think that’s a level of keeping things very simple. When you plant your own food and harvest your own food and tend to plants, there is something very related to peace in that in terms of simplicity and being connected.
One more thing I do that helps me make sense of the world is interacting with wonderful young people. There is nothing like talking to a 19- or 20-year-old person to give you hope that we can get better, that human beings will continue to not want to hit each other and kill each other but actually to try to understand each other. I feel lucky that most of my time in the classroom and working with students is connected to being completely inspired by their purity of thought that’s not contaminated by hardship of life. And that’s not to say that 19- and 20-year-olds haven’t had hardship, but there is something sort of raw and pure in the way that they see things. I love being around that. I love being a part of that.
I think that the Empty Bowls project, on an academic level, helps students really connect to history. We watch some scratchy, wonderful black-and-white film of people making pots and we look at contemporary examples. I always bring an artist in so they see another person throw. They connect to history, and I think that that’s really powerful when they realize that while technology—different kilns and things—has certainly impacted our field, at a very practical level, we are doing the exact same motion that someone did 500 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 2,000 years ago. The body movement is identical, and I think that that’s pretty powerful.
I think some of the students have never really thought about what it might be like to not have enough food. We usually take a trip or invite the executive director of the Food Shelf to talk to the students. Recently a student started to cry when Jim Blaha, the executive director, talked about how summer is a really difficult time for families in which the parents work in farming and agriculture. They’re outside working all day in the sun, and they choose not to eat so that their children can eat. That can lead to dehydration and malnutrition. I looked over at one of the students, and her eyes were just full of tears. She said that it never occurred to her that a parent would have to make the decision to not eat so that their children could eat, especially in the summer—you know, we think about how everybody should have a turkey at Thanksgiving and we should give gifts to the poor at Christmas. But I think it’s really powerful when students realize that summer is particularly hard for a lot families because there’s no free lunch or subsidized lunch at schools, so that’s another meal that the family has to come up with to feed everyone.
It’s also a delicate issue because I have to assume that there are likely students in the class who may have used the Food Shelf at some point in their lives, so it’s a delicate balance to try not to expose or embarrass any students. I always thought it would be wonderful if someone who uses a Food Shelf come to our class, but I also don’t want to be exploitive at all. I don’t want to create a sideshow out of someone who needs those resources, so it’s a delicate balance.
On a real fundamental level, students have a lot of fun with the Empty Bowls project. A number of times I’ve heard students say it’s so refreshing to trim someone else’s work. There’s a different level of anxiety. “I’m going to make a mistake on someone else’s thing!” But there also is something really refreshing about getting to know a piece that they don’t know, getting to know a bowl, and then trimming it and decorating it. Sometimes the collaborative nature of the project ends up in really interesting pieces, and sometimes they’re kind of train wrecks. Sometimes three or four different ideas in one piece maybe don’t make a lot of sense aesthetically, so that gives us a lot to talk about.
And I think that students new to the project have a hard time believing that in a 40-minute period of time 500 people will come and choose a bowl and eat a bowl of soup. They just have a hard time believing that until the masses descend on the tables. It’s a very exciting 40 minutes of people looking at bowls. Even though the bowls are made in collaboration so they’re not anyone’s individual piece, this might be the first time that some of the students have watched members of their community study what they’ve made so closely. The people take the time to choose just the right bowl, I think that that’s really exciting for a lot of students.
I think a culture of busyness gets in the way of peace a lot. I think that the Carleton culture in particular (although certainly not unique to Carleton) has a kind of a pride in being overcommitted, in doing too much. You try to schedule a meeting and someone says, “Oh, I have a meeting at this time and this time and this time and this time, so the only time available is 11 p.m.” And I think, “Oh, what are we doing to ourselves?” I’m completely guilty of it. I don’t mean to say that I’m any better at protecting quiet time, but I think that is something that I need to keep reminding myself to strive for. It’s quite a lovely thing to be too busy doing things that are really interesting, but there is a cost to that. I don’t ever want to try to judge how people spend their time, but I think on any given night there might be ten things that I would love to be a part of. Sometimes I see students coming and going out of a concert or out of an event or out of a lecture and I think, “Oh, they’re trying to capture 20 minutes at four different events.” But, really, if you were at one for an hour-and-a-half you might get to a deeper level of engagement that would be better. So busyness is certainly an obstacle in my life.
I don’t know if I should really say this, but I will because I believe it. I think that somehow we as a culture have a very skewed idea about the worth of things, about value. This is something I’m struggling with very much in my home life, to understand how we have a value system that says that the least expensive thing is the best thing or the bigger thing is the best thing. I know that there are a lot of people who are very eloquent in the way they talk about trying to make your life more simple, but it just seems like—I think that eggs should be really expensive because I think that raising chickens is an expensive endeavor, and that when we try to relate something like the food we eat to a mass-produced factory, like a manufacturing model, it just doesn’t make sense.
I guess I feel the same way a lot about art-making, that there are some things in life that are more valuable when they’re closer to home, like the relationship between you and your food, or you and your objects that you eat from, or you and your house and the building materials used in your house. When those relationships are tighter, to me that’s more valuable, that that creates more of a sense of peace. Again, I think that there is a movement right now in this country for people to think about eating locally and bigger is not necessarily better, cheaper is not necessarily better.
A number of years ago I was teaching a class. It was at a seminary, a graduate-level course called “Pottery and Proclamation,” which is a very lofty title. The folks in the class for the most part were working towards becoming ordained within their faith communities. I didn’t share that spiritual path with them really at all, but I was very appreciative of how thoughtful they were in trying to make sense of the world within their belief systems. In the class there was a woman who had recently lost her partner to cancer, and this woman was in a period of mourning over the loss of someone who was incredibly important to her. As she learned how to make pots she realized that one really powerful thing in her life would be to make a pot to hold the ashes of her partner.
So we met and we talked a lot about in different cultures. In a lot of different Native American cultures, for example, there is an understanding that you’re making pots out of your ancestors, that we all become part of the earth and when that earth is used to make pots, that the pots actually have bits of our ancestors. So we talked a lot about the idea of sifting some of the ashes of her partner into the clay to make the vessel that would then hold the rest of the ashes.
So, we met one day at Northern Clay Center to make this vessel. We met in the middle of the day thinking that it would be a quieter time, but there was a children’s class in the next room and there was crazy laughter. While we listened to that noise of children, we sifted these ashes into the clay and wedged them together and threw this very simple container on the wheel. The woman, who had only been doing clay for a few weeks—it was as though the clay just threw itself, like our hands were just barely there, that it just took shape in such a wonderful peaceful way. We made a lid for the piece and then we met a couple weeks later to glaze the piece. And now it’s in her house, this container that is made of this person that she loved so much and containing the remains of this person that she loved so much.
It’s been one of the nicest things in my life, that we’ve continued a friendship. I’ve known her now about 12 years. And I think at that moment—hearing the voices of children and making a piece with someone I really didn’t know well at all but this being part of such an intimate part of her life, that that was a moment that I felt like, “Oh, this is peace. This is a perfect moment.” Perfect in a messy, confusing, emotional sort of way, and I guess that that’s what makes the most sense to me.
Robert Arneson, my very favorite ceramic artist, had his body cremated, I think in his kiln. That’s the legend. I don’t know if he actually could do that because I think that there would be laws that would govern that. But, in any case, he had his last few pieces, his last series, glazed with his own ashes, which I think is a pretty amazing thing for a clay person. My partner says, “No way!” Far too morbid.
I’m absolutely hopeful for us. I don’t have children of my own, so I so treasure the relationships I have with students. I think when you talk to optimistic young people it’s impossible not to feel optimistic. I’ve been teaching for about 15 years. Along the way there’ve always been students that I’ve really connected to and thought, “Oh, I can’t wait to know these people for 40 years.” I think that now there is a movement among young people—whether you want to link that to the economic condition right now or the political condition—there is a renewed sense of personal responsibility, of a connection with the earth, of a sense of the power of people working for a common goal that makes me feel very optimistic, very hopeful.
I think that an important part of finding peace in my life has been directly connected to joy. There’s the idea of peace being connected to a lack of violence, but a life without violence but also without joy is, to me, hardly a peaceful life. There is something about laughter and about playfulness that opens up the hope of a peaceful life. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that. I don’t want to go through the busyness of life or the steps of life without thinking about and finding complete joy in the simplest of things.
