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I met Deborah Smith in the Ceramics Department of the
University of Southern California in 1969.
She had just returned from two years in Japan after being graduated from
Stanford in Japanese language. In
Japan she had apprenticed for a year with Yamamoto Toshu in Bizen. She was on her way to Japan again, this time
for three months to act as an interpreter for Susan Peterson who was
researching her book on Shoji Hamada. I
was on my way to Europe after a protracted university career that included 3
years studying art on a basketball scholarship at Pepperdine College, 4 years
in architecture school at USC and finally a BFA in ceramics.
We had discovered in each other a vague interest in
the philosophy of the East--not uncommon at the time--and would meet again in
India. Pondicherry, the home of the Sri
Aurobindo Ashram, was in 1970 often characterized as a quiet village on the
Coromandel Coast of Southeast India.
What is now the Union Territory of Pondicherry had been a French
colony. It was handed back to India in
1956, but at the turn of the 20th century it was a safe haven from the British
Raj and attracted the Bengali revolutionary/mystic Sri Aurobindo Ghose. The
ashram began as a closely-knit group of Sri Aurobindo and four or five
disciples in 1910. Sri Aurobindo passed
away in 1950, but the Ashram has become a Pondicherry institution, now with
upwards of 1500 disciples.
Deborah and I founded the Golden Bridge Pottery in
Pondicherry in 1971. Deborah, who
arrived three months before I did, was asked by one of the secretaries at the
ashram if she would start a pottery workshop.
"Yes," she said, "if my friend comes to build a
kiln."
 The Golden Bridge Pottery, still loosely connected to the
ashram, was the first workshop to make glazed stoneware pottery by hand in
South India. We now employ fourteen
people and our work has become the standard for small-scale handmade production
pottery in India. There are now more
than fifteen potteries in the Pondicherry area, making everything from raku to
porcelain, in one-person studios or small-scale units employing up to forty
people, makers ranging from educated Indians and Westerners to unschooled
villagers with absolutely no prior experience with clay. We have been teaching for twenty-seven years
and there are studio potters all over India that have come to learn with
us. Since 1997 we have been hosting
workshops with artists/educators from abroad, including Susan Peterson, Jane
Perryman, Jim Danisch, Mike Dodd, Sandy Brown and Betty Woodman.
Deborah has been in charge of the pottery production since
1985, when I began a 13-year project developing fire-stabilized mud building
briefly discussed on the "Fired Houses" page of this web site. In 1996, with the fired housing period
largely behind me, I returned to working with clay on a more modest scale for
exhibition in India. The purpose of
this web site is to broaden the reach of this new direction.
Ray Meeker
Pondicherry
December, 2002
Click here for more GBP photos
Click here for CV
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