[MUSIC]
IN THIS WEEK'S SUPER SOUL SHORT
WHEN HER INNER QUESTIONS KEPT RESURFACING,
AN ARTIST CREATED A FRESH NEW INTENTION
FOR HER LIFELONG WORK
MUSIC
I live in Pentz, Nova Scotia.
On the old Pentz road,
just down from Pentz School.
And my name is
Louise...Pentz. We had a
small barn which I could use as a shop.
A potter's wheel, loaned from a friend,
and we used an electric kiln.
Pentz Pottery was born.
For thirty years,
I created production work.
"And I, for some reason,
looked up the word vessel,
a clay vessel,
that's what I create.
And I was surprised to find out that the word
vessel had four different meanings."
So how to express that?
The first definition of
vessel is, it's a container.
A bowl, a jar, a jug, a pitcher.
I have five different patterns collected:
fruits and flowers, grapes and roses,
and you know-
stuff that sells.
And year after year, people came.
I loved it up until the last year.
And in the last year,
my heart went out of it.
Perhaps that led to the shutting down
internally of I don't want to make pots anymore.
At the same time,
there seemed to be so many stories in
the media daily about the
atrocities and injustices being
put upon women around the world.
And I thought, am I contributing
to the problem by my silence?
And I came to the
conclusion that I was.
The material is capable of
saying more than a functional pot.
So, use the material to say
something you care about.
The second meaning of the
word vessel is, it's a boat.
A vessel is a boat.
You're in a ship,
It represents our journey of life.
And so all these boat forms took
shape and I went from creating these
vessels to, ok,
now I want to focus on the figures.
Female figures that told
these stories
was what I needed to do.
The third meaning of vessel
is a vein or an artery.
The red line between the figures
pierced through their heart,
it represents our lifeblood,
it's our connectivity to each other,
it represents all our stories
from previous generations.
This process of smoke-firing is so
-it's so primitive, it's so simple
to touch a material that
came out of the earth and to
shape it and to fire it so that
it's hardened and useful and beautiful.
Once you've had the joy of
creating something with
your mind and your hands,
it's a bit of an addiction.
These sculptures just like us,
they are strong and powerful
and enduring, like the women
I'm trying to represent,
but just like us, also, they're
very fragile and vulnerable.
So this piece of work, if
all goes well, it's going to
be around in 2000 years time.
It will still have my
fingerprints in it, then.
And the fourth definition
of vessel, it's actually in Scripture.
We are containers for the spirit.
So when I read the definitions,
I had all these pictures in my
head of what that looks like.
I have found my voice of
protest for the way women are
treated in the world.
You know, it was thirty years,
but it's faded pretty quickly.
What I'm doing now is much more
engaging and satisfying.
And hopefully someone is
listening, and hopefully
someone else will say, I think
the same way, I feel strongly too.
The artists have an important
role in bringing about social change,
so find out what you can do.
I can do clay, that's all I know.
If everybody did what they could,
gosh, it'd be pretty interesting.
I think those that perpetrate
hateful things on others,
they're banking on our silence.
Recognize it, we all have power.
Now what?
What are you going to do with it?