?I didn?t realize the influence that farming had on my creativity until relatively recently,? he said. ?It came to me that my full-time work is dealing with earth, as my family?s work is. We both need to pay attention to our earth or we will not be pleased with the results.?
Goertzen?s ?Of the Earth,? show has another connection to farming, Goertzen said, and that is plants?more specifically, trees.
?The majority of the work in this show is wood-fired and I have harvested wood to complete these vessels,? he said. ?Wood not only heats the kiln?the ash from the wood fire lands on the pot?s surface and forms a glaze or, where the pot is pre-glazed, alters the glaze.
?I made most of these pots a little uneven or rough to capture more wood ash as it goes through the kiln.
?No two pots are the same as there is no way to exactly control the flame-wind going through the stack of ware in the kiln. My wood-kiln goes to almost 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit and my last firing was held at that temperature for 30 hours.
?I have also included some high-fire glaze work?the brighter greens, blues and reds. What ties these pots to the brown-toned, wood-fired pots is that the glazes also need wood ash to brighten them.
?I do my best to make vessels that take advantage of these two forms of firing, yet I won?t know exactly what the pots will look like,? Goertzen said. ?My interest is in that mystery. The beauty for me is in the variation that I could never have thought of.
?Like a farmer who plants a seed in the ground, I do my best to make the conditions right for success, but it is never totally up to me.?
Goertzen is a 1988 graduate of Bethel with a bachelor?s degree in art. Since 1989, he has worked as a potter at The Old Bag Factory in Goshen, Ind., a three-story, 1890s-vintage building originally constructed as a soap factory and until 1982 the home of two different bag factories.
The Old Bag Factory hosts a number of working artists and craftspeople. Goertzen collaborates with Dick Lehman to produce the Lehman-Goertzen pottery line, creating and firing more than 100 different functional and utilitarian ceramic works on-site.
Goertzen has participated in pottery workshops in Tokoname, Japan, and Christchurch, New Zealand. His work is in private collections in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Sweden, Taiwan, the United Kingdom and the United States.
He was part of the Carnegie Juried Show at the Carnegie Center for the Arts in Three Rivers, Mich., in 2008 and the ?20+1? International Invitational Wood-Fire Exhibition at the Northern Arizona University Art Museum in Flagstaff in 2006.
Since 2006, Goertzen?s work has been available at the Red Lodge Clay Gallery in Red Lodge, Mont., the Open Door Gallery in Sturgis, Mich., and Village Pottery Gallery in Intercourse, Pa.
?Of the Earth? will be on display through March 6. Regular hours for the Bethel College Fine Arts Center Gallery are Monday-Friday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. The show is free.
