"How to speak of these many years of coming to Demarest?
back when I was, skinny and my pots were lean, and so full of excitement and the craziness of youth and it’s certainty, my friend Mitch Lyons and I drove up the New Jersey Turnpike and together walked into the unknown of the Art School at Old Church... what to expect? what would we see? would anyone come?
it was a leap of faith in response to a request from Karen to participate in what she called...
“ this little show we have”.
into the parking lot we came, opened the back door and slowly found our lives altered in the most wonderfully crazy and inexplicable ways as the time passed.... through the years, so many pots flowed in and out of those doors so many hands and hearts left visible in baked mud... such love and thought and effort expressed in countlessly varied manners... all coming to this place, at this time, for this weekend coming from the mountains, the cities, the suburbs, the plains and of course all those folks from, you bet, Minnesota... so many different people, all here, all believing in this weekend Temple of pottery... all believing making pots was indeed a noble undertaking and proving it in spades... the spine tingling reassurance of it was intoxicating... and that was before the conversations, both verbal and visual, the dinners and parties that cemented such a wonderful sense of community and its wide breath... entrees of expansion and learning... here at, “ this little show we have”
as if that wasn’t enough... the dessert arrived... people began lining up outside, early, to get in first, lots of people and more and more of them they came from all over and kept coming... full of questions, lathered with interest, knowledgeable , curious and appreciative... wanting to buy things!!! not just look, but, ravenously buy the pots our love and thought and effort held close by others, living in the world and speaking to countless numbers of people, daily, for the price of a quiet glance, in a brief moment, after a long day... all because someone chose to want them and share them in their life, thereby completing our cycle of object making... is this not the best dessert imaginable?
here at... “this little show we have” "
- Rob Sieminski