The Vessel and the Void: Human Becoming in Clay: The Art of Djakou Kassi Nathalie

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

                                                                                     The Vessel and the Void

                                                                                     Human Becoming in Clay

                                                                                  The Art of Djakou Kassi Nathalie

                                                                    

                                                                                                  Abstract

This essay explores the clay art of Djakou Kassi Nathalie, a Cameroonian visual artist residing in Nigeria, whose work in clay generates profound resonance between material substance and human experience.

 Through close analysis of Nathalie's ceramic forms, the essay develops a framework for understanding clay art—drawn from earth, shaped by hand, and transformed by fire— as an epistemic medium, as material and metaphor—one that simultaneously evokes the biological foundations of human existence, the structuring of consciousness, and the mystical expansion of awareness.

 Drawing on philosophical, literary, and spiritual traditions from Africa, Asia, and Europe, the essay traces how Nathalie's sculptures enact what Samuel Taylor Coleridge termed the "esemplastic imagination": the shaping power that forms coherent wholes from diverse materials. 

Nathalie's clay works speak to the human condition not through representation alone but through evocation—prompting what Kant called the imagination's power "to spread over a multitude of kindred presentations that arouse more thought than can be expressed in a concept determined by words."

The analysis proceeds through detailed engagement with seven of Nathalie's works, examining how formal elements—concentric circles, ruptured surfaces, nested spheres, and stylized faces—generate associative fields that resist verbal closure while inviting contemplative participation.

Vortex, a work evoking cosmic force and the infinity of imagination; Reduce and Reuse, a dynamic form resonant with ideas of cognitive flight and integrative awareness; The Shaper and the Shaped, my name for an image of Nathalie constructing a voluminous pot whose deliberate fracture complexifies beauty; Keep it Green, an elegantly squeezed yet aerodynamic shape evoking the womb of possibility; and The Nesting, so named by myself, a tender double-sphere sculpture that speaks of birth, nurturing, and the dialogue between form and formlessness.

The essay interprets Nathalie's ceramic works as symbolic structures that mirror the human condition: emergence from earth, formation through experience, vulnerability to fracture, and openness to transcendence.

It is argued that Nathalie's clay art constitutes a mode of knowing, a cognitive architecture wherein the moulding of earth mirrors the moulding of consciousness, and the firing of clay parallels the transformative fire of experience, art becoming sites of encounter between matter and meaning, emptiness and form, the known and the unknowable.

Nathalie's art is thereby positioned as a vehicle for contemplating life's mysteries, the interplay of structure and void, and the creative impulse that mirrors cosmic and personal unfolding.

                                                                                        Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju

                                                                                                    Compcros

                                                                             Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems

Contents

The Clay Art of Djakou Kassi Nathalie

Clay Art as Emblematic of the Human Experience

       Geological and Human Biology

         Clay Art and the Epistemic Imperative

                 Clay Art and the Fundamentals of Consciousness

                  The Fire of Consciousness

                   Clay Art and the Mystical Expansion of Consciousness

                      Clay Art, Integrative and Disruptive/Integrative Mysticism                                            

                         and the Metaphysics of the Void

 

                                 Integrative Mysticism and the Cyclical Symmetry                                 

                                   of the Clay Pot

 

                                   The Metaphysics of the Void

                                     Clay Art and Disruptive/Integrative Mysticism

               A Journey Through Some of My Favourite Nathalie Clay

               Creations

                              Image and Text: Vortex

                              Image and Text:  Imagination as Ascent

                              Image and Text: The Ruptured Pot: Beauty Beyond

                              Beauty           

 

                              Image and Text: The Womb of Time

                               Image and Text:  Fractured Wholeness

                               Image and Text:  Reshaping Self

                               Image and Text:  The Sphere Within the Sphere: The    

                                Womb of Forms

 

                                                 On Form and Process

                                                   Thematic Resonance

Clay Art as Cognitive Architecture

The Pot and the Cosmos

Conclusion: The Infinite Circle

The Clay Art of Djakou Kassi Nathalie

An artist in clay whose work I particularly admire is Djakou Kassi Nathalie, a Cameroonian who lives in Nigeria. She is a visual artist in diverse media, from painting to wood to clay, and more. The artist speaks engagingly here about the various materials she employs.

I am particularly intrigued by  her use of clay because of the evocative values of this substance, associative potential amplified by her utilization of the medium, shaping clay into structures that spike the imagination. This stimulation generates pleasure through the creativity embodied by the constructed form, taking the mind on a journey, a journey of collocations, of convergences between the art and possibilities beyond it.

I approach Nathalie's creativity  as speaking directly to me, as both an individual and a representative of the human race. I see it as helping me make sense of my life as a person on a journey. Her art enables me better appreciate my existence as motion between the unknown and the unknown. Through her work, I become more sensitive to my being as poised  between the time before birth and the time after leaving the Earth. I am made more alive to who I am as a person for whom every day is a mystery and an opportunity. I become more alert to the prospect of further embodying the mystery of life, an opportunity to unfold its potential at the nexus of the known and the concealed, between the expected outcomes of the day and its unforseen possibilities.

Clay Art as Emblematic of the Human Experience

       Geological and Human Biology

Clay is made from soil. I have long been fascinated by the beauty, power and associations of earth. Earth reminds me of the totality of nature, from soil to sky. I understand nature as  humanity's heaven, readily accessible by the very fact of human existence.

Clay art, art created from earth, brings this evocative power to my mind. Clay, easily moulded into shapes, can be kneaded into a structure and fired, exposed to intense heat in a kiln, making it hard and durable.

What more striking image could one find for the human experience?

Built  from muddy stuff into something shapely and strong, like the human being fashioned by the meeting of spermatozoa and egg into a slowly growing structure of flesh, bone, nerves and brain. Emerging into the world to be fired by the tensions of experience into something defining the journey of a conscious entity through space and time. Beautiful and delicate. Powerful yet fragile. The human person.

The making of clay art is akin to the making of the tender, squealing, helpless creature, covered in blood, who emerges from the human being in whom she has been gestating for months, after which she is cleaned and fed, and begins a long journey in a world she will never fully understand, as the countless who have come before her have not fully understood it in the millennia since humanity emerged from life as single celled organisms in ocean waters.

Experience, in its known and unknown forms, the expected and the unexpected, shapes the traveller in ways pleasant, unpleasant and in-between, until at last she moves on to a place unknown.

Clay art has long been associated with veneration of Earth, inspired by Earth's character as the ultimate sustainer of existence known to humanity,  perhaps the oldest form of veneration practiced by humankind, stretching from ancient times to the present.

The making of pots from clay, associated with the womb on account of the evocative force and practical value of the space pots hold, has long linked Earth and womankind in the human imagination. Earth-woman-life-pot- an associative rhythm resonating in clay creativity.

Hence, clay art, in general, and clay pots, in particular,  have generated archetypal associations in various cultures. The Bible depicts God as structuring the first human being from the soil of the Earth. Yoruba Ifa literature describes the deity Obatala as shaping the child in the womb from clay, for the ultimate creator Olodumare to breathe life into the newly constructed shape. This creative continuum extends to Iya Mopo, the goddess who is both pot and potter, patron of all female activities, including childbirth. Clay pot making is sacred to Ala,  Earth, the Goddess who enables human material and cultural existence in indigenous Igbo belief.

Nathalie's work resonates with these associations without being bound by them. Her forms evoke the womb not through direct representation but through volumetric presence—the capacious interior of a pot, the nesting of smaller forms within larger ones, the dark liquid streaming as if from some primal source. These are not illustrations of ancient beliefs but reanimations of their generative force.

         Clay Art and the Epistemic Imperative

I am particularly inspired by those perspectives that extend the significance of clay from its biological associations into the epistemic, into correlations with the development of knowledge. Through such approaches, the entire arc of human possibility is addressed, from the foundations of human terrestrial existence in nature to the human ability to reflect on the existence enabled by this biological enablement. The shaping of earth into form finds its analogue in the shaping of experience into knowledge. Both processes involve selection, organization, and transformation; both yield structures that enable us to inhabit the world more fully.

This epistemic dimension of clay art—its capacity to model and stimulate knowing—emerges with particular clarity in Nathalie's work. Her forms do not simply represent ideas; they enact the very processes by which ideas come into being. The moulding of clay becomes a metaphor for the moulding of mind.

                 Clay Art and the Fundamentals of Consciousness

This sub-section-''Clay and the Epistemic Imperative''- turned out to be the last to be written in this essay. While composing the section, I rose from bed one morning marvelling at the sheer pleasure of shaping the verbal construct that is this work. The associations between moulding clay and constructing ideas, of relationships between the fire of consciousness and the expanse of possibilities enabled by knowing became clearer for me.

In composing the essay, I am an artist shaping the clay of ideas into form, a creator whose tools are his mind, represented by ideas  constructed in that mind, ideas expressed through words and the instruments through which those words are crafted-my computer and its software. I become an artist and thinker celebrating the profound satisfaction of sensitivity to the power of awareness, of being alive and conscious, and shaping this cognizance  into ideas.

The Fire of Consciousness

The firing of clay offers a particularly rich analogue for cognitive transformation. Raw clay, shaped but unfired, remains vulnerable—it can return to slime, lose its form, dissolve. Fire transforms it irreversibly, rendering it durable, functional, capable of holding and containing.

So too with consciousness. Raw experience, however vividly felt, remains transient until subjected to the fire of reflection. Thought shapes experience into knowledge; memory shapes knowledge into wisdom; articulation shapes wisdom into culture. The kiln of consciousness fires the raw clay of living into the durable vessel of meaning.

Mazisi Kunene's account of Zulu epistemology captures this process with poetic precision:

A fruit is ripened by the sun-fire. The body is ripened by the blood-fire. The mind is ripened by the life-fire. Fire matures things, changes them, translates them to a higher order which is the capacity to nourish phenomena other than themselves.

Nathalie's fired clay participates in this same transformative economy. Each piece bears witness to the fire that made it durable, just as each mind bears witness to the experiences that made it wise.

     Clay Art and the Mystical Expansion of Consciousness

Moving from the fundamental reality of knowing, I am further galvanized by ideas on the ultimate possibilities of consciousness, possibilities at times associated with working with clay. This cognitive potential involves  constructing conceptions at the farthest zones opened up by the fire of consciousness shaping and expanding the scope of its understanding. Along this line, I am most thrilled  by mystical interpretations of creativity with clay, orientations that relate it with the aspiration to understand or experience  the essence or totality of existence as a reality of the human person, and not just an idea in the mind.

             Clay Art, Integrative and Disruptive/Integrative Mysticism and the Metaphysics of the Void

This involves two approaches in relation to the evocative force of clay-the integrative and the disruptive/integrative, both of them involving using clay in constructing pots. 

                      Integrative Mysticism and the Cyclical Symmetry of the Clay Pot

Mazisi Kunene's account of Zulu epistemology, theory of knowledge,  in his introduction to Anthem of the Decades presents the integrative stance, invoking metaphors recalling the shaping of clay into a pot and its exposure to fire to harden it:

After creation, man was endowed with two minds: the precision mind and the cosmic mind. While the precision mind analyses and reorganizes the details of the material environment, the cosmic mind synthesizes fragments of information to create a universally significant body of knowledge. 

At the highest point of reasoning, significant units of information merge with  universal concepts pulled together by a unique form of intellectual power. [This enables a form of wisdom that ] sees all things in their balanced proportions and in their totality.

When the cosmic mind grinds its elements of experience into a totality of knowledge it acquires a discipline which by its 'horrific' power erases the boundaries between the past and the present, the living and the dead, the physical and non- physical. The individual initiate acquires, like a chameleon's all- round vision, the power to conceptualize the totality of life at once. Such wisdom is enshrined in the rounded calabash of symbolic cosmic power.

...

A fruit is ripened by the sun-fire. The body is ripened by the blood-fire. The mind is ripened by the life-fire. Fire matures things, changes them, translates them to a higher order which is the capacity to nourish phenomena other than themselves. This process demonstrates the highest cosmic ideal, that is, an interdependence within all living phenomena

That lightly edited summation of Kunene's words depicts a cognitive ideal in terms of the circularity of a calabash, akin to a clay pot, since clay would have been the exclusive medium for pots in the period of Zulu history that the ideal being referenced was developed. This epistemic vision is integrative beceause it involves conjoining ''units of information'' and ''details of the material environment'' with ''universal concepts'' to  ''create a universally significant body of knowledge''. The symmetry of the calabash may be correlated with that of the pot, associations amplified by the fecundity of soil used in making the clay pot. These correlations cohere in generating an image of generative force and cognitive creativity shaped by the mind as it reaches towards cognitive totality.

     The Metaphysics of the Void

Another image of epistemic expansivess is that centred, not on the symmetry represented by the circularity of a calabash, in its similarity to that of a   pot,  but by the evocative force of the emptiness at the centre of the pot.

The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu puts it this way in his Tao te Ching:

We put thirty spokes together and call it a wheel but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the wheel depends.

 We turn clay to make a vessel but it is on the space where there is nothing that the usefulness of the vessel depends.

We pierce doors and windows to make a house but it is on these spaces where there is nothing that the usefulness of the house depends.

Therefore, just as we take advantage of what is, we should recognise the usefulness of what is not.

That summation of paradoxes points towards, not simply the practical value of physically empty spaces, but of ultimate reality in terms of emptiness, emptiness evocative of transcendence of concepts, of what can be grasped by the mind.Here the cognitive analogue shifts from structure to openness, from knowing to the ground of knowing, from concepts to that which concepts cannot grasp. The void at the pot's centre becomes a symbol for ultimate reality—empty of determinate qualities, yet the condition of possibility for all determinate existence.

These paradoxes resonate with Daniel Odier's  Tantric Quest a text from another cultural context, Indian Hindu Tantra, but resonant with the Tao te Ching:

I began to make pots and jars, thinking all the time of the wonderful void that contained my consciousness and my wonderful consciousness that contained the void.

I came to understand little by little that the void was full, that fullness was empty, that the void was rooted in the clay, and that if the clay did not recognize the void, it could never become a pot or a jar.

I lived very happily until one day when a tantrika came to buy a jar for his master. I told him that I wanted to take this jar back to his master myself as a present, as a testimony of what constituted my freedom. We took a bus, and then we walked in the mountains for a long time. The master, amused, asked me if the inside of the jar was empty or full. I answered that it was full of emptiness. Immediately, he took me on as a disciple.

Tantalizing, mysterious, poetic, but how meaningful?

How can a person’s consciousness "contain the void’’ ?

The void she shapes as the core of her clay pots?

Coexistent with her consciousness because of her concentration on her artistic task as she moulds the pots?

A co-existence metaphorically extended into sharing the being of that structural emptiness?

A metaphoric expansion further correlated with the idea of a metaphysical emptiness,  with the idea of the source of existence as void, empty of any identity the mind can grasp?

Nathalie's work engages this disruptive-integrative tradition through forms that break symmetry, introduce rupture, or centre emptiness as positively as form. Her pieces do not simply represent wholeness; they enact the dialectic between containment and release, form and formlessness, the known and the unknowable.

             Clay Art and Disruptive- Integrative Mysticism

These paradoxes are further developed in Odier's Tantric Quest:

It's like the inside of a pot. The air inside says to itself, 'The universe is tiny. I see only a small circle of sky. Around me, a wall of earth marks the boundaries of my life. What's outside?' Suddenly, [the God]  Shiva comes and smashes the pot. The air that was imprisoned by restrictive thought is instantly merged with the universal air mass. That's exactly what happens at the moment of awakening [ to cosmic unity] , but also at death.

Once the boundaries of the ego shatter, the divine returns to the divine, energy to energy, space to space, the heart to the heart. Then, anything is possible but nothing is certain.

Popular teachings sometimes speak of reincarnation. The highest Tantric teachings say that fundamentally there is no birth and no death, only the illusion of being enclosed in a pot, creating the desire to rejoin with another pot. The debate over annihilation or eternal life is something adepts transcend as soon as they recognize the nature of their own minds.

A Journey Through Some of My Favourite Nathalie Clay Creations

 Vortex

                                                                                

          

Vortex, the name of this piece, is my point of entry into Nathalie's work. I am intrigued by the title, particularly in its associative symmetry with the artistic form.

A vortex is '' a whirling mass of wind or water spinning  so fast it forms a vacuum at its center, into which anything caught in the motion is drawn'' 

( Collins English Dictionary).

The concentric circles at the bottom of the structure evoke the vortex concept, something spinning, moving in circles at such speed, it pulls down anything caught within its core. An image of irresistible power,  evoked by concentric circles at the bottom centre of a small, exquisitely shaped object.

The interior of the structure is polished and shining black, moving smoothly towards the concentric circles from edges delicately crumpled inward. The vortex image is thereby reinforced by the design of the form leading inward to the nucleus.

Yet, this direct association between the design and the name of the work is only the beginning of what may be described as the associative vortex of the piece.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant puts it powerfully:

[Art goes beyond the limitations of conventional expression to] present something different, something that prompts the imagination to spread over a multitude of kindred presentations that arouse more thought than can be expressed in a concept determined by words.

These aesthetic attributes yield an aesthetic idea [giving] the imagination a momentum which makes it think more in response to these objects  than can be comprehended within one concept …

( Critique of Judgement )

  

What Nathalie is able to evoke about the idea of a vortex goes far beyond what can be summed up in words as they represent ideas. This is because her work stimulates the imagination, which is potentially infinite in its power, limited only by the mental wealth of each person.

The concentric circles magnify the evocative force of a circle, multiplying a circle's suggestion of endlessness, of unity. Correlated with the title of the piece, the concentric circles could suggest a particular kind of vortex.

What kind of vortex could demonstrate the sense of infinity, of endlessness?

A cosmic vortex?

Perhaps the primal explosion through which the universe came into existence, shaping and reshaping matter and energy by spewing them outward and dragging them back inward in a continuous cycle, a hypothetical process integrating scientific cosmology and Hindu creation myth, depicting the cosmos as created, destroyed and recreated across massive time scales?

Faces peer at the unfolding sculptural tableau from the edges of the construct. Watchers at the beginning of time? Human consciousness projecting itself imaginatively into that zone well before the emergence of humanity?

Encapsulating the laws that define cosmic unity and dynamism in an equation. Verbal expressions  summing up what humanity has discovered or speculates about the universe. These are some of the efforts of the human mind to understand the cosmos in which it finds itself, thereby making sense of the vastness within which it exists.

Through the evocative force of title and construct, Nathalie's piece may be seen as sharing in the epistemic universe represented by those ultimate demonstrations of the creative power of the human being.

           Imagination as Ascent

 
                                                                 

The Buddha spent years, it is written, seeking the meaning of life, often alone in thick forests far from human habitation, in order to escape distraction. Upon finding what he sought, he shared the knowledge with a dedicated band of people, his disciples.

After years of teaching by word and example, one day he asked his students to sum up what they understood to be the essence of his teaching. Each of them responded with a richly complex philosophical statement. To each respondent, the Buddha would symbolically grant as a reward for the person's insight, something of his, from his meagre belongings as a mendicant to parts of his body. 

The more insightful the disciple's summation was, the more intimate to the Buddha would be the symbolic reward. Thus, he dedicated his clothes, his staff, and most intimate of all, his skin and his bones, those body parts being the most intimate of his physical possessions.

It came to the turn of the last disciple to speak, but he maintained silence. A pregnant silence. A silence represented by the fact that he gave the impression of having a lot he could say, but  preferred to keep silent.

The Buddha, understanding that this disciple had grasped the essence of his teaching beyond all the others, granted him the ultimate symbolic gift, the core of his own material form- ''to you, I give my marrow''.

Over the centuries of Buddhist art, the ''thunderous silence'' of this disciple, as it is known, has often been visually evoked. A person standing still, but his manner suggesting a profound eloquence, pointing at something inexpressively rich, but which cannot be projected in words because it transcends human conceptual and expressive capacity.

This perspective on Buddhism, a variant of the story of the Buddhist teacher Bodhidharma from Paul Rep's Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, Zen being a Buddhist school originating in China and deeply shaping Japanese culture, is similar to the use of empty space in classical Chinese and Japanese art. This emptiness at times envelopes human forms depicted as miniscule within massive space, a good part of that space empty, an emptiness evoking what is described as the ''Void'', the zone beyond being and non-being understood as the source of existence, the ''Void'' the Buddha's disciple tried to evoke by his ''thunderous silence''.

In Jan Carew's fictional story ''The Third Gift'', from Ulli Beier's edited Political Spider,   a community has its members climb the Nameless Mountain at the foot of which they live so that the person who climbs farthest and brings back a symbolic gift indicating how far they have climbed would become the prophet and leader of the community. The first winner emerges from the mountain with a gift representing the value of work, which inspired the community into prosperity through labour. After that leader passed away, the second winner returned with a gift evoking beauty, leading to the community cultivating environmental  beauty as a way of life. On the second leader's demise, the third winner came back with his hands empty, an emptiness explained by his story of a marvellous experience at the mountaintop:

''I got up to the mist [on the mountain]  and over and above it and I didn’t know how long it take ’cause past the mist was a brightness that blind my eyes and came a time when all I felt was a soft carpet under my feet and when I breathed in the mountain air it was like drawing knife blades up my nose. And when my sight came back I found myself right up at the mountain top. . .''

''Lord you must ’ave seen the whole world from there, brother!'' [ a listener exclaimed]

''Yes and while I stand up there a soft white thing like rain start to fall . . . and yet it wasn’t rain ’cause it fall slow like a leaf when there is no wind ... it fall and flutter and spin and some of it settle on my head and my shoulders and I reach out my hands to catch some of it.. . and when I hold it in my hand one minute it was like fire and next minute it was cold like a mountain pool. . . so I catch a handful of it and press it hard in my hand. And I feel wind fluting in my bones and I set out on my way back home - and all the time I was feeling this thing in my hand - and down the mountain side I ran. 

Sun hide himself from me when I was in the mist, and leap out at me again when I burst through and come to the green of the mountainside, and the wind was cool on my face and the whole plain and savannah stretch before me. And the further down the mountain I come the less of this thing I had in my hand, ’till when I reach by the river was only memory I had in my hand.''

And this man whose name was Jymara become prophet of the Jubaho people ’cause he bring the best gift of all . . . the gift of imagination, of fantasy, of faith. And Jymara rule his people for all time.

It is a similar  paradox represented by the evocative force of emptiness that Nathalie's piece above evokes for me. Nothingness, voidness, emptiness, as an ultimate symbol of the limitless, a symbol turning reality on its head by indicating that the greatest possibility is best evoked by the image of absence, a classic dramatization of the capacity for metaphorical flight enabled by the imagination, flight suggested for me by the aerodynamic force of Nathalie's  piece, structured like a bird in flight, fronted by the curves of a human face, lending the work to interpretation as evoking the mind behind that face in flight in worlds of mental possibility.

The motif of the circle again appears at the centre bottom of this form, balancing the sense of elevated motion with the idea of integration suggested by the circle as a form that unifies its own motion within itself,  a line curving into itself in an unbroken rhythm.

Aerodynamic motion and unificatory rhythm conjoined. I saw myself flying through an infinite space and yet as I flew the universe came together within me, so that I  was both flying and integrating all possibilities within myself, such a correlative depiction of a visionary experience may be imagined. Is something similar not the power of imagination? The mind soars through far ranging possibilities, yet that soaring is an experience in which associative vistas come together in the mind.

I looked into myself, into the centre of the circle where being is united with becoming, seeing at last my eternal face, knowing it birthless, knowing it deathless, knowing it endless.

Soaring beyond space and time, beyond the unbounded magnitude of worlds upon worlds and systems of systems, the limitless times of their periodic motion, their beginning and continuation.

Beyond the animal creature that is my form, provided with vital force for a short time, one knows not how,  eventually giving back to the planet, a mere speck in the universe, the matter from which it came.

Yet  infinitely experiencing my worth as an intelligence,  a life independent of animality and even of the whole world of sense, not restricted to the conditions and limits of this life but reaching into the infinite.

The magnificent symmetry of Nathalie's construct, aerodynamic structure in tandem with the evocative force of the circle and of her trademark stylized faces, visual rhythms amplified by juxtaposition in this image, take my mind to the idea of contemplative penetration into the core of the self, suggested by the visual motion from the face to the circle centring the form over which the face rises.

That impression of elevation, allied with the billows of the shape on which the face is stamped, gives it the appearance of a bird in flight or a jet in mid air. This sense of flight suggests to me the idea of cognitive elevation projected by the quote above from the Indian Upanishads on transcending mortality-birthless, deathless, endless, and that from German philosopher Immanuel Kant's Critique of Practical Reason on  moving beyond space and time into infinity, passages conjoined here to evoke the associative force of Nathalie's piece in its conjunction of the impressions of flight and unificatory rhythm.

The title of the piece is Reduce and Reuse, a call to recycle materials instead of readily discarding them, one of the challenges of modern living. The ability to visualize such a down to earth social challenge in terms of such such a richly evocative and multi-semantic construct as that elegantly streamlined piece dramatizes the ''flying mind'' represented by creative force, a concept adapting the title of another work by Nathalie.

     The Ruptured Pot: Beauty Beyond Beauty           

                                                           

                                                                    

The pot Nathalie is shaping in the picture immediately above is magnificently volumed, its tapering curvature generating an image both bulbous and elegant.

It is surmounted by minimalist faces evoking identity, a constellation of intelligences perhaps gazing out into the world in attention and wonder amongst a sequence of other shapes, a configuration of structures, physical identities and interpretive possibilities, graceful and enigmatic.

Why that rough opening in the otherwise smooth exterior of the pot, the jagged hole breaking its flawless symmetry, the edges of the open space suggesting something torn and lumpy, structured through a process both dynamic and rough?

It is the beauty of the unbeautiful, projecting order as going beyond smoothness, as exceeding the anticipated represented by the polish defining the larger part of the work, a rupture complexifying what would otherwise be something visually and even tactily powerful, but existing purely within the realm of conventional shapes.

The artist wishes to go beyond conventionality and so introduces the deliciously contradictory into the harmony of the piece, transitioning it from something beautiful to something beyond beauty, into something powerful and perplexing, in which what may be seen as ugly becomes indispensable to the harmony of the form.

Potential of unknown scope, life unfolding in ways beyond full understanding.

I sought capacious knowledge, broad enough to encompass the dynamism of the universe, only to experience within that elegant construction a fracture in the cognitive citadel, opening my vision to the stars wheeling in splendour in the vastness of sky, beyond mind.

The big pot that rolls on and on without breaking……

 

 The pot-breasted mother

 

 With much hair on her private parts;

 

 The owner of a vagina that suffocates like dry yam in the throat

 

 The inexhaustible sea, immense water

 

 Roaring eddy of sea shells

 

 Vibrations from the deep.

Babatunde Lawal's translation, in The  Gelede Spectacle, of a Yoruba poem celebrating Earth as mysterious and powerful mother complements the unity of creator and created, of pot and potter suggested by the image  of the living elegance and power that is the human woman moulding the gloriously symmetrical, evocatively voluminous and yet elegantly fractured pot.

The Shaper and the Shaped is my name  for that image. 

                 The Womb of Time

                  

                                                                                                                    

                                                                      

                                                      

           

 

 

My favourite Nathalie piece. Dexterously structured, clay moulded like a crumpled handkerchief, even as the entire configuration may also evoke a complexly designed spacecraft moving through space.

 

Why that circle in the centre?

 

The womb of time?

 

Clay, representing the fecundative power of the most ancient of materials, the earth itself, is shaped into dynamic folds centred in an integrative space, a hollow defined by the evocative symmetry of a circle.

In that moment of expanded awareness, as my vision glowed deep gold, I saw Being, that which makes existence possible but is not subsumable by existence, as a circle, its centre everywhere, its circumference nowhere.

Does the universe have a beginning? Can it have an end? Does the cosmos have a purpose? To what degree can the possibilities of the universe be understood?

Questions resonating across scientific, mythic and religious cosmology, across philosophy, history and the arts-the human mind awakening within an already moving universe and attempting to grasp the narrative into which it has been thrown.

We are, each of us, castaways on what might be called the Island of Non-Meaning—aware, questioning, yet unable to reach ultimate explanations.

And yet we cannot stop asking.

This impulse to ask, to map, to interpret, to shape the formless—this is the womb of knowledge.

It is akin to the  impulse that shapes clay into imaginative forms.

The balance between space and form, between sinuous curvature and unifying ground in Nathalie's clay art, both elegant and powerful, suggests the human mind generating images of primordial creativity, the esemplastic imagination  of English thinker S.T. Coleridge,  the plasticity of nature's creativity, enabled in the human being's abilities to shape reality.

The shaping of earth into form mirrors the shaping of consciousness into knowledge.

Art becomes epistemology.

The pot becomes cosmos.

 Making sense of reality within an individual and communal context, integrating intellect and imagination.

Constituting cognitive architectures: the structuring of diverse realities into inhabitable worlds of meaning,  each domain turned on the wheel of inquiry and fired into durable form.

Keep it Green is the title of this piece by the ceramist, invoking the need to nurture the Earth. 

      Fractured Wholeness

                                                                      

This seemingly uncompleted pot yet evokes wholeness in incompleteness. Elaborate patterning is inscribed on its point of squeezing into seeming fracture, making the bent space both rugged and sensitive

 

''In the wholeness of a clay vessel there is an inherent fragmentarity, and in every shard is borne a history of wholeness.

A broken pot may never regain its wholeness in terms of its original form, but at the point of its fracture appears a new objectivity, a new entity.

As the poet and playwright Ossie Enekwe observed, 'Although a broken [clay] pot does not return to its original shape, it is not negated. It passes on to other levels of existence'. Clay, as matter and figure, therefore connotes perenniality.

[The Ghanaian artist] El Anatsui found in clay the figurative resonances of both fragility and resilience…properties [he found ] very exciting and full of sculptural and conceptual possibilities, each speaking to significant aspects of nature and existence, and especially to the cyclicity of life [as suggested by] the susceptibility of [clay] to reductive transformation [its] peculiar vulnerability …to destruction and recycling [connoting ] the absence of finality and the presence of infinite possibility''. 

 

Olu Oguibe's “El Anatsui: Beyond Death and Nothingness”, resonates with Nathalie's seemingly uncompleted pot, yet evoking wholeness in incompleteness, the elaborate patterning inscribed on its point of squeezing into seeming fracture indicating the display and arresting of creative force, withdrawing from closing the gaping hole left unclosed in the centre of the construct, the circumference leading to that space compressed in a roughness both rugged and sensitive.

Faces rim the circumference where the rupture occurs. Another testimony to the constellation of thought and identity which the human face represents.

The title of this work is The Blackout. 

                  Migrating Faces

 

                                                                                                           

                                                                         

''The use of symbols to connote ideas which defy simple verbalization is perhaps one of the oldest of human traditions'', state Sylvester James Gates and Michael Faux, explaining why they named their mathematical system after Asante Adinkra symbols ("Adinkras: A Graphical Technology for Supersymmetric Representation Theory").

''What was the face you had before you were born?'' asks the Zen Buddhist koan, a philosophical riddle meant to provoke thought through its paradoxical nature. The question points toward an identity more fundamental than any particular embodiment—the face that precedes faces, the self that precedes selves. Nathalie's cylinders multiply this question across their surfaces. Each face is different, yet each participates in a common grammar; each evokes a specific presence, yet all point toward presence itself.

The elegantly patterned faces on the sombre beauty of the clay cylinders, Beauty of Differences,  pictured above, project the sense of ancient votive objects, sacred containers, an impression incidentally amplified by the  character of the space where they are photographed, a rough background that may suggest an ancient temple recovered from the earth, like the buildings of Pompei, covered through centuries by volcanic ash from the eruption of Vesuvius.

Yet the faces are unmistakably Nathalie's: stylized, evocative, at once generic and particular. They gaze from the cylinders with an attentiveness that feels contemporary even as it echoes the ancient. These are presences that have returned from time, bearing witness to what endures.

Gaining new knowledge changes one, even if only subtly, adapting Patrick Dunleavy's Authoring a PhD. A particularly forceful cognitive impact could make one a significantly different person, driven by the inspiration emerging from that encounter. 

The oval and  circular faces of Nathalie's cylinders resonate with ideas of the human face as echoing the self, the movement from one facial form to another suggesting the reshaping of the self through movement across cognitive space, a recreative process similar to the artist's moulding of clay, soil suffused with the capacity to nurture life, adapted to the shaping of images bodied forth by the artist.

Moving from one facial form to another may evoke the reshaping of self through cognitive movement. As the artist moulds clay, so experience moulds identity; as the cylinder receives new faces, so consciousness receives new configurations. The process is endless because the self is endless—not a fixed entity but a continuous creation.

        

             The Sphere Within the Sphere: The Womb of Forms

 

                                                                                                      

                                                                            

This exquisite clay construct, which I name The Nesting,  resonates with me in terms of its sheer, lyrical beauty. The sphericality of the pot and the sphere resting on it complement each other, as dark liquid streams from the pot, suggesting birth, emergence. I am particularly intrigued by this work, in its unity of the small and the large, of miniscule and bigger symmetries in unison. 

Its lyrical voluminosity shapes a  resonant concavity as the smaller sphere rests on a depression on the surface of the bigger sphere, cradled like a child. The bigger sphere is not smooth. Its surface is textured, incised, marked with patterns that suggest both organic growth and deliberate inscription. The smaller sphere rests in a concavity that is itself part of the larger form—a depression that holds the sphere as a mother holds a child, as the earth holds a seed, as the cosmos holds a world. The dark liquid that streams from the top of the larger sphere, evokes birthing, bringing forth,  the overflow of creative excess.

I have returned to this sculpture many times, drawn by something I cannot fully articulate. It speaks, for me, of origins—not the origins we can trace historically but the origins that precede history, that underlie every particular beginning. The sphere within the sphere is the structure of creation itself: every form contains another form, every world emerges from a world, every birth is a rebirth of something that has always been.

Nathalie's work draws on African traditions of clay sculpture, but it is not bound by them. The forms are ancient and contemporary at once, speaking a language that predates any particular language. The sphere is the most universal of symbols—the sun, the moon, the earth, the womb, the cosmos—yet in this particular sphere, handled by these particular hands, it becomes something new.

What is it to create?

The question hangs in the air filling the space the sphere occupies. To create is to bring form from formlessness, to shape matter into meaning, to make visible what was only potential. The potter at the wheel knows this: the clay offers resistance, but it also offers possibility. It can be shaped because it is willing to be shaped. Creation is dialogue, not monologue—a conversation between intention and material, between vision and resistance.

Nathalie's spheres speaks of another creation as well: the creation that is birth, that is emergence, that is the coming-to-be of new life from old. The sphere in the concavity is the child in the womb, the fruit in the flower, the world in the cosmos. Creation is not only making; it is also bearing, nurturing, bringing forth.

The womb of forms. 

All forms emerge from a prior formlessness, all shapes from a prior shapelessness. The sphere within the sphere is the visible sign of this truth: every container contains, every form is formed, every beginning begins from what has already begun.

Standing before this sculpture, I feel myself held—held in the concavity of existence, cradled by forces I cannot name. The dark liquid streaming from the larger sphere is the overflow of being, the excess that cannot be contained, the gift that pours forth because creation is not economy but abundance.

May we learn to receive as we are held.

The experiential implications of the nestled sphere, its sphericality resonating with that of the larger oval on which it rests, is one of my most intimate aspirations. Womb space, cosmic space, mind space, resonances of earth as body, as mother, as artistic form, as enabler of cognitive firings, clay as akin to the stuff of which the self is constructed, of which consciousness is made-associations that tantalize in response to this particularly memorable piece from Nathalie, resplendent in hues both sombre and radiant, like earth at the beginning of time.

Let us imagine the artist speaking for herself:

In this work, I arrive at wholeness. Cradled in immensity, my mind traces the infinite circumference, a perfect circle of rest. Yet perfection fractures: the wheel crumples like sensitive paper—solid, enfolding, pleated across time's stream. Interdimensional folds rupture infinity, admitting unknown possibilities. This is the genesis I sculpt—not static form, but dynamic breach.

The clay construct before you embodies this rupture. Its lyrical voluminosity rises from etched black surfaces, textured like primordial earth scorched by cosmic fire. Rivulets streak the dark oval, suggesting streams of memory or emergence, pooling into a resonant concavity. Here, the small orange sphere nestles—cradled like a child in the womb's depression, its vibrant hue piercing the somber expanse. Sphericity echoes sphericity: the inner form mirrors the outer embrace, a microcosm birthing from macrocosmic hold. Dark traces stream from the sphere's crest, as if vital essence overflows, defying containment.

This nestled duality is my intimate aspiration. The smaller, orange sphere, raw and radiant, evokes the spark of consciousness amid earth's vast body—womb space folding into cosmic expanse, mind space igniting cognitive fire.

Clay, pliant as the self's raw stuff, becomes the medium of revelation. I mold it not as mere vessel, but as mother: nurturing, generative, eternal. Somber blacks yield to radiant orange, hues of genesis—like earth at time's dawn, before light fractured shadow.

On Form and Process

I begin with the wheel's illusion of even motion, then impose rupture. The large oval, coiled and textured by finger and tool, mimics weathered bark or volcanic skin—incised lines flowing like time's cross-foldings. No wheel's potter's device here; hands alone shape the crumple, firing clay to solidity while preserving sensitivity. The sphere emerges separately: burnished orange, smaller yet insistent, placed in the depression to nestle without adhesion. This precarious cradle demands balance—love's turning force holding chaos at bay. Glazes are minimal; natural slips and smokes yield the dark streams, evoking liquid memory or primordial ooze. Each piece fires in reduction, birthing cracks that echo infinity's breach.

Thematic Resonance

Earth as body, as mother, as artistic form: these are not metaphors, but material truths. The sculpture pulses with fertility's tension—containment versus overflow, circle versus rupture. It whispers of human origins: the child-sphere, orange as dawn's first warmth, emerging from black womb-night. Cosmically, it maps mind's expanse—neural firings as interdimensional pleats, consciousness as clay's fired alchemy. In African earth-tones, it honors ancestral clays, linking personal epiphany to collective genesis. Viewers feel the cradle's pull: rest in immensity, then the tantalizing crack admitting the unknown.

This work invites touch, contemplation, rupture. It is my will turned by love—the love sculpting stars from dust. In its concavity, find your own infinite circle; in its sphere, your aspiring core.

 The Womb of Forms: The Sphere Within the Sphere

 ''Like a wheel in even motion, my will and my desire were turned by love, the love that moves the sun and the other stars''

Dante Alighieri, Paradise.

I felt whole at last, at rest in the immensity that cradled me as my mind spun round the circumference in an infinite circle.

The folding of the circle, the crumpling like the folds of paper, sensitive, solid, enfolding, the varied configurations of the time  stream, interdimensional cross-foldings, the rupture in the circle, the  crack in infinity admitting hitherto unknown possibilities.

 

Clay Art as Cognitive Architecture

The works examined above suggest a framework for understanding clay art as a mode of cognitive architecture—the structuring of diverse realities into inhabitable worlds of meaning. Each piece constitutes what Coleridge called an "esemplastic" formation: a shaping power that unifies diverse elements into coherent wholes.

This cognitive function operates at multiple levels. At the most basic level, the clay object organizes sensory experience—form, colour, texture, volume—into a unified perceptual field. At a deeper level, it organizes associative experience—the memories, feelings, and thoughts it evokes—into configurations that invite reflection. At the deepest level, it organizes existential experience—our relation to birth and death, self and world, time and eternity—into forms we can contemplate if not comprehend.

Nathalie's art excels at all three levels. Her forms reward prolonged attention; their perceptual complexity discloses new dimensions with each viewing. Their associative richness generates interpretive fields that resist closure while rewarding exploration. And their existential resonance speaks to conditions we share across culture and history—the mystery of origins, the fact of mortality, the longing for meaning.

The Pot and the Cosmos

If clay art can be understood as cognitive architecture, it can also be understood as cosmological modelling. The pot is a cosmos in miniature: it has boundaries that define an interior; it contains and preserves; it undergoes transformation; it participates in cycles of use, breakage, and recycling.

This cosmological dimension emerges with particular force in works that emphasize containment—the nested spheres, the voluminous pot, the cylindrical vessels. Each form models a world: bounded yet open, structured yet dynamic, complete yet incomplete. Each invites us to consider our own world-making activities—the ways we construct meaning, establish boundaries, create interiors that shelter and sustain.

The questions that animate scientific and religious cosmology find their echo in these forms: Does the universe have a beginning? Can it have an end? Does it serve a purpose? To what extent can it be understood? We cannot answer these questions definitively, but we can—through art—inhabit them more fully, feel their weight and their wonder.

Conclusion: The Infinite Circle

Dante concludes the Paradiso with an image of cosmic love turning the sun and other stars. The same love, I have come to believe, turns the potter's wheel—not the physical wheel alone but the wheel of imagination that shapes form from formlessness, meaning from mystery.

Nathalie's clay art participates in this turning. Each piece embodies a moment in the infinite circuit of creation and reception, making and meaning, form and emptiness. To encounter her work is to enter this circuit—to feel oneself drawn into the spiral of associations, held in the concavity of form, released into the space of imagination.

I return, at the end, to the nested spheres. The smaller sphere resting in the larger's concavity is, for me, the image of what art can be: a presence held by presence, a meaning cradled by meaning, a mystery nested in mystery. We cannot finally grasp what Nathalie's forms mean, because they mean more than can be grasped. But we can hold them—in attention, in memory, in the concavity of consciousness—and let them hold us in return.

In that holding, we approach what Kunene called "the capacity to conceptualize the totality of life at once"—not as possession but as participation, not as comprehension but as contemplation. The infinite circle turns, and we turn with it, drawn by the love that shapes clay into cosmos, and cosmos into clay.

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