Julie Lluch (born March 5, 1946, Iligan, Philippines)

Terracotta artist, Julie Lluch graduated with a degree in Philosophy from the
University of Sto. Tomas in 1967. After her first one-woman exhibit in Sining
Kamalig in 1977, she continued to fill the scene of Philippine Sculpture with
distinct expressive works of a personal nature, both domestic and spiritual
themes, using the feminine medium of indigenous clay. Co-founder of
KASIBULAN and KALAYAAN, she is one of the bastions of the national women’s
movement in the area of the arts.

Among her many honors, she was awarded the 1992 CCP Thirteen Artists
Award, 1995 Most Outstanding Woman Artist in Quezon City, and the 1997 Araw
ng Maynila Sining at Kalinangan Award.

She is well known for her depiction of the state of love and desire in her Hearts
and Cacti Series and Cutting Onions Always Make Me Cry.

“Notes on a Potter’s Life” is an essay where the terracotta artist as woman

explains her spiritual devotion to clay and sculpture.

Notes on a Potter’s Life

By JULIE LLUCH

I tend to idealize the potter’s life – its closeness to nature, its romance with earth,
water, wind and fire, its simplicity. I am endlessly impressed with the story from the bible
of how God fashioned man out of clay and blew into it the breath of life. What vivid
imagery! How apt the metaphor! I see the potter meditatively bent over the turning wheel
out of which rises a vessel of clay. That, I tell myself, is how I shall spend the days of my
old age, turning out magical pots in some quiet retreat near the mountain, or beside the
sea.
I recall watching the great Japanese film Ugetsu about a simple potter caught in
the cross currents of love, ambition, and war. It used the ancient oriental Art of Pottery as
a symbol of human spirit, attested to by the fragments and shards ubiquitously present in
the background of all civilizations, races and histories.

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 I have secretly wished to be a potter and would have become one; I hadn’t known
I didn’t posses the qualities and temperament it takes to be one.
I have often asked: what is it that makes a potter go on making pots over and over
again, day after day? Is he not happy with his pots or is he still looking for the perfect
one? His apprenticeship is long and his subject inexhaustible.
I liken the potter, quite romantically, to the primitive brujos of Carlos Castaneda’s
landscape whose secret knowledge of nature is the source of their powers. The potmaker
of old is an accomplice of nature. In making a pot, he waits for the right season, the
correct time of the day, chooses the exact spot on the earth, the elevation, the aridity,
humidity. He checks the turn of the wind, the color of fire and after attending to a
hundred other preparations, waits and prays for the unseen powers to favor the work of
his alchemy.
I look on pottery as pure art. Here the artist serves as instrument of the material
and not the other way round. The simpler the pot, the better it is. If it pretends to be other
or more than a pot, the less perfect it becomes. It is pure in the sense that it is free from
the intrusions of the maker’s person, who, as in the case of less pure arts, seeks to impose
his mind on his material to get across a message of idea, a story or style – whatever it is –
the self. A true potter sets aside ego and personality to achieve a good pot. This for me is
true discipline, true humility.
Pottery, I decided, is not only unnatural but also impossible in the city. A monk
can best pray in his monastery cell or a landscape painter can best paint in the great
outdoors.
Most potters I know have settled in the countryside where they may be closer to
their sources and elements and work in peace beside a mountain or the sea, I, too, have
tried to break away from the city, time and again, but I have eventually learned to move
with the brisk beat of city life and to be energized by the richness of complexity, the
texture and color of urban culture. I have become reluctantly urbanite (a city mouse if
you like) continually enticed by technological novelties but wary of the efficiency and
sophistication of metropolitan living.
I would be a potter in the wrong environment and would produce a different kind
of pottery. Nevertheless, I would speak the old language of clay.

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 In the world of art there exists certain set of values and reactions that have
nothing to do with reason. Clay aspiring to be art is considered cute. Clay has always
been regarded as traditional; it is provincial, vocational, substandard, backward; it is
nature, artifact, craft, folk; it is palayok. At best, it is ceramics. But it is NOT “Art.”
I found the allusions amusing and I began to realize as I went on working that
clay sculpture/pottery, sculpture/ceramic art – whatever it is named, is a new and exciting
thing as far as Philippine art is concerned and its possibilities lay waiting to be explored.
Moreover, I discovered that clay could deliver well in high streets. It doesn’t have
the sleek-smooth efficiency of bronze, but bronzes all tend to look alike and woods all
seem to have the same finish. Clay has a charming quality, sometimes both endearingly
naïve and sophisticated. Remarkably versatile and tractable, it can be witty, kitsch or
even erotic. Speak a very personal language, from slang to classic.
From its origins, this subculture, sub-artistic medium carries with it the natural
grain of protest and has evolved into a wonderful vehicle to pounce upon “high-art” and
its agents of repression.
On occasions, I find myself arguing and defending lowly clay against the nobler
and harder marble and bronze. And I need never fear it would run out on me because
even as oil and acrylic get scarcer and dearer by the day, all the earth is covered with
clay. Such is my confidence in this medium which has become to me a good weapon and
companion, an alter ego thru the years.
I love to think of clay as the most apt poetic metaphor for artistic creation. It is a
very sensual medium – soft, obedient and pleasurable to the touch. The artist is in most
immediate contact with it, working directly with his hands and body. There are no
intermediary tools.
I derive most childlike delight working in this medium, remembering the time in
childhood when playing with dirt and mud was such a grievous misdeed. Clay is a natural
plaything and touching it revives old instincts. The thing is to let them out as fast as I can,
as spontaneously and as joyfully.
I worked with children for a time, teaching forming methods like pinching, slab-
making, coiling and freehand sculpting. It is the youngsters who enjoy themselves the
most, playing lustily while giving the impression of seriously working and being so proud

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afterwards with their unfinished works. Play, work and art. How happily they go
together.

Portraits
My early works were nudes and busts in terra cotta, mostly of members of my
family, poets, artists and friends. Clay lends itself sensitively to portraiture, receiving the
slightest pressure of hands, registering the finest lines. Even my finger marks are visible
all over the work.
I used a buff-colored groggy clay-mixture fired low, sanded and smooth, painted
or tinted and then waxed shiny. I was pleased with its flesh-like texture and tone, the grog
showing on the surface like tiny pores on the human skin.
After a while, I grew uneasy and defensive about doing busts, a feeling I would
eventually and quickly get over with it. Portraiture had long lost artistic esteem. It is
“passé” and commercial, besides, what can it have to say about social conditions and
current issues? But portraits will always be around and the artist’s repertoire will not be
complete without them.

For a time the idea of people took hold of me – grouped figures, multitudes,
masses, droves of human bodies moving together. This was the time of unrest and Great
Quarter Storm when the artists marched down the streets shouting slogans, students and
communists burned effigies and stormed government buildings. This was also the time
my husband painted his Jai-Alai series of numberless, faceless people queuing up ticket
counters, mobs and city characters filling up rows of fronton galleries betting their last
money and their souls in the game. Those were troubled times and, personally, also a
stressful period. I did ceramic sculptures of students demonstrating, a religious
procession of the Black Nazarene, a winding stream of migrants leading to nowhere. My
husband’s influence on my work was clearly evident and inevitable. It was good
influence, too, during my formative years.
In the later part of the 70’s I witnessed the phenomenal development of Philippine
art. The number of artists multiplied by the hundreds, galleries sprung up here and there
and exhibitions were held every week. Every kind of western and oriental idea was tried

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out, no “ism” was spared. I heard artists speak of relevance, social consciousness and
commitment. The local art scene became a chop suey of sorts, not really a bad thing for
Philippine art.
As my own awareness expanded, I sought an angle from which to view the world.
I didn’t know much about life in general nor the world at large. I sought only to deal with
things I knew best and which were closest to my heart.
Subsequently, I found myself working from the feminine viewpoint, creating
sculptures with a rather tacky sexist character. There were a lot of women in my work,
like the biblical “Susanna Bathing”, as fierce animals stalk and lustful elders watch from
behind the rocks and bushes.
In my later works, I reduced conceptual elements in order to go back to the
medium. One thing about clay: it is so receptive; one easily indulges one’s self in
indiscriminate expression. This tendency I tried to control. In my new work I found clay
again as my personal medium, exploring its sensuous character purely on the level of
feeling or sensation.
These works are more abstract and concentrate on simple forms that draw
attention to tactile qualities. For the first time I used glazes, disproving my own previous
misconception about glazes being incompatible with sculptural works.
Perhaps what I’m doing now is to go back to pottery. I enjoy doing simple forms,
repeating them endlessly. I turn out phallic-like cacti forms, rocks and numerous heart-
shapes.
I believe in working to exhaustion and satiety. When something takes hold of me,
the longer it takes to drain out. I think an artist, like the Almighty God of Genesis
hovering over His awesome creation, stops to rest but only when happily satisfied he can
say of his work: it is good.

Source:

Lluch, Julie. "Notes on a Potter’s Life”. Unpublished essay.

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PRE DEPARTURE ACTIVITY

Interview a child in a pre-school and ask him why he likes playing with
clay. Take a photo of his work. Describe the forms he makes.

GUIDING LIGHTS:

1. How does Julie Lluch see clay as a medium? Why this particular medium and no
other?

2. How does the artist “serve as an instrument to the material’?

3. What has she shaped and how has her life shaped her choice in subjects?

CONNECTING FLIGHTS

Play with clay. Make a self-portrait. Experience Lluch’s “serving as an

instument to the material.”