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Colorado artist Michael Wisner studied with Juan Quezada in Mata Ortiz, a small town in Mexico, now famous as the home of over 300 ceramic artists taught by Quezada. As a young boy, Quezada discovered pots painted by his ancestors, the Paquime Indians, and “reinvented” the technology to create ceramics from the materials of the land.
Michael Wisner carries on the tradition, creating coiled pots from clay he finds in the wild, cleans, and coils into fine art pieces. Unlike many traditions to “copy” the pattern and style of the culture, Quezada – and Wisner – believe in “inventing” one’s own style while also using ancient technology. And so, over 20 years ago, encouraged by the philosophy of his mentor, Wisner asked himself, “What can I do to stand on the shoulders of the people I’ve learned from and try to do something new?”
He decided to continue the tradition of using native clays, natural colors, and the hand building process, while contemplating how to emulate the interplay of painted patterns and the excitement of the geometry. And so, he began developing his own style, creating tools and pressing patterns into clay, rather than painting them, to honor the patterns and structures he observes in nature: seed pods, bicycle spokes, meandering rivers, wood joints, pinecones, the calix of a sunflower, and more.
Of these patterns in sacred geometry, Wisner, an English, Spanish, and Portuguese speaker, thinks of it as a language. “I am learning a language and then figuring out how to use it. To translate into clay the way nature has found to lay down shingles—one on top of another—and once I’ve decoded the intelligence of it, it’s like a jazz musician riffing.”
