Edited by Madison Challis
It is disarming to find yourself reflected in a book and The Last Sane Woman is nothing if not a mirror to the lost potter. Hannah Regel has pierced through me like wire through fresh clay unearthing every insecurity I have as a woman potter who makes very little pottery. Her opening sentence ‘I want to read about women who can’t make things’ ricochets around the walls of my head daily, and I want to ask her, how does a woman make a thing? What sort of process is necessary to expel the object from her body? Throughout the book, Regel plays with these questions, her protagonists just as unsure as I am. There is pushing and pulling and fury. No matter what, there always comes a point in making when I want to throw my object at the wall in hatred at not being able to make it look as it does in my mind. ‘I want to write about women who can’t make things.’ What happens to a woman who can’t make things? Does she wither up and fold into herself like a dying fern or does she simply become a less productive member of society? The problem with pottery is that once you have fired it, there is no going back and if you throw it at the wall, it will sit there and be fractured forever. The beauty of it, however, is that in those precious moments, with your hands in the clay, you can make and remake and remake and remake to your heart’s desire. Sometimes it feels like an anxiety attack to remake something infinitely and not get anywhere, but there is always something new discovered, either about the clay, your hands, or your heart.
Regel’s novel introduces us first and foremost to Donna’s ‘world of fire and form’, that of pots and kilns and solid objects with hard boundaries, but with each chapter gradually dissolves into the ‘wet world of the mind’, with Donna’s life and pots loosening each of their boundaries. If you roll out a piece of clay onto the wrong surface, the boundary between the two disappears, and the clay attaches itself to the slick surface, impossible to prise off, scraping, getting clay under fingernails, wiping. Each time something goes wrong in her life, her pottery suffers, and she changes course. She walks across a pathway between house and shed, made up of her own crumbled pottery. This moment feels like a turning point for her, where she acknowledges her failures and starts to incorporate them in her artistic process, breaking pieces on purpose to stick them back together again.
I once dropped my phone into a bucket of reclaim that I had stored on a bedroom floor in university accommodation, and it disappeared under the murky, opaque surface. The Last Sane Woman exists in this opaque world of clay, where it is hard to define where something should end - process or object or emotion.
Something that I think about often is how Regel describes Donna’s pottery. They are technical and thought-out pieces whilst also being full of emotion. She describes the wheel, hand building, burnishing, and even the process of building broken pieces of pottery back together with wire and slip. At no point through these descriptions of making does she describe a final object to us. They are always being made but never finished. It is hard to imagine their shape and form, their colour. They are burnished, which is a difficult process of taking leather-hard clay and running either the back of a spoon or a smooth rock across the surface until the clay shines. Once fired, these pieces are non-porous, shiny, and durable, and often look like they have been carved out of wood. Near the end of the book, we see a pot on the mantelpiece of Donna’s friend and confidante, Susan. All the same, it is not described but simply remains ‘the pot that lived on the mantlepiece, that always got such compliments.’ It is a loving way to see her pottery and feels funereal in its finality. We have achieved the clearest description of one of Donna’s pots on display in a person’s home, and it is sitting in place of an urn for her memory.
What is it to fail at making things? There is something embarrassing about trying to lift and pull and tug at clay until it becomes what you were hoping for, although it never becomes what you were dreaming of. I wish I was made of clay often, then I would be able to reshape my body, and therefore both my memories and my future.
Regel’s second protagonist is a dreadfully familiar face named Nicola. An art school graduate flitting between crap jobs, bubble wrapped ceramics stuffed under the bed, she wishes for something wonderful to happen to her because she believes she is special, besides making nothing of note. She sees herself in Donna and reaches desperately for her air of tragedy but cannot grasp it.
Regal writes as if she is writing with clay. The words come out of her hands and form themselves into a container. The three women float around inside her unfired pot and intersect in surprising ways, sometimes seeping through the walls. They move across generations and it is comforting to read failure in different forms and know that it is consistent.
What good is a sculptor that cannot make anything? I would rather write about not being able to make things than sit down and try to make something. To be a potter is to make useful things. To build a pot and to put something in it. What good is useless pottery? Poetry can perhaps be useful as it takes up less space and costs less to make, and a person can read it and make up their own mind about it. You cannot make up your own mind about a pot. But then I remember that my mother collects jugs and puts them on a shelf and never uses them. They are in the kitchen as if ready to be used at a moment's notice, but they are only decorative. They are not substitutes for vases or cups. They are there for fun. I will make her a jug for her birthday, and she will put it up there on her alter and never use it. For the best. I am bad at making my pots waterproof. I glaze badly and water gets through. At that point I have made something that will be inherently bad at its job. Does that mean I am inherently bad at my job? If I make useful objects that are useless. What a joke! At least if I write about it, it will be less frustrating. Less unachievable. If I write about being bad at making things it is still in a way making me produce something, so in that case have I still failed?
Inside all the art and the anguish, Regel even manages to pinch the skin exactly where it hurts when it comes to artistic networking and social gatherings. She is painfully aware of the anxiety and overwhelming feeling of failure that invariably arises in these moments. The hatred I feel for myself and my art and my inability to explain both in these God-awful dinners and drinks becomes a shared anxiety. Hannah Regel has made my acid reflux die down through the offer of familiarity. We sit together at the end of the table talking about anything but art.
Book Cover
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