about The Potter and The Surgeon

The Potter and The Surgeon is in the collection of The Bainbridge Island Museum of Art in Bainbridge, WA.

The Potter and the Surgeon, in art and text, reflects on creation and loss. As in much of her other work, Pérez designed this book with an additional layer, one that only reveals itself upon deeper examination. In this case, she completes the pages by trading her brush for a needle, and pierces tiny pinholes in the paper. These holes (different sizes and pierced in different directions) create and complete lines. Under normal viewing, these lines and textures go largely unnoticed. When held up to a light source, however, the reader is gifted with a parallel viewing experience, where light streaming through pinholes reveals a glimpse into an unseen realm or alternate reality.

The Potter and The Surgeon, poem by Marshall Weber

The Potter and the Surgeon

I feel death

arising to contain me

as sure as a potter’s muscled hands

feel the turning clay

forming the jar.

Fleet soft liquid

formless in motion

yet, when the tears dry,

solid enough

to hold all the dust of the century 

distilled by the imminent flames.

What have I tallied

all these short years

and endless nights?

Though I cannot always feel it

or reciprocate

I have sensed that love

surrounds me

in partnership, friendship,

solidarity, and familial bonds.

 
There love is

flowing in the rivers

in the eyes of every animal

in the motions of the eyeless

waiting patiently

for me to hold it gently

as the potter holds the spinning earth

and as the rising vessel of life

embraces us all.

Once I knew a surgeon

who made guitars

he cried not when the flawed board

splintered and broke

or the patient’s bloody wounded heart stilled

knowing that his strong slender fingers

had done their best

and there was more wood

to make sing

and many more bodies to make whole

in the coming days.