🎧 Lindsay Rogers: A Place at the Table Brandon Reintjes

Appears in the December 2023 issue of Ceramics Monthly.

The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.

Paul Cézanne is credited with the radical statement, “The day is coming when a single carrot, freshly observed [in a painting] will set off a revolution.” To her credit, ceramic artist Lindsay Rogers has observed and depicted that carrot, and the revolution is here. At a time when our global food system is in crisis, Rogers creates spare, stoneware vessels adorned with the silhouettes of garden plants in a palette of black and white glazes. She says, “I make work that ranges from utilitarian tableware to . . . presentation vessels that use the natural beauty of locally grown vegetables as a starting point for their own celebration.”

Connecting the Garden with the Kitchen

Rogers advocates for sustainable food systems while making work that, to quote food icon Alice Waters, “connects the garden with the kitchen, and with the table, and back to the garden again.” Rogers, who is always reading and seeking new information, says this quote is what changed her work and aligned it with the food movement. 

Rogers’ evolution as a potter has gradually unfolded over the past decade, from the time of her MFA thesis in 2013 to the present. She was introduced to the problems of the global food system through Slow Food International, a mostly European grassroots organization founded to preserve local food cultures and traditions that gained a foothold in the US in the early 2000s. This expanded to Rogers’ work on an organic, bio-diverse farm, which established a direct, personal connection for her between growing, eating, and land. 

There is a strong crossover between growing things and good health, something Indigenous people have known for eons. We’ve incorporated the language of botany into our bodies, using botanical terms pathologically and vice versa. Rogers points out that bodies are communities or ecologies, a microcosm of the biodynamic earth. Rogers says that she works “to encourage a reconnection with each other and with the food we eat . . . Food production and how we create, serve, and eat in this country is something that I think about frequently as I work . . . Over time, I came to understand just how ripe with possibility this connection between pottery and food [can be]. Potters have long emphasized the connection between the handmade and the ritual of eating or drinking, where the gentle craft of a finely made vessel elevates the food experience in meaningful ways.” With the proliferation of the home garden, increased composting, and widespread access to farmer’s markets, the assumption is that we live in a golden age of locally grown, organic vegetables, a veritable Eden of availability and freshness, but the reality is that a simple carrot is burdened with conflict. 

Fighting for a Foothold 

Across the globe, the twin scarcities of drought and food insecurity are magnified by human-caused crises—climate change, environmental racism, colonization, and an extractive economic model that exploits land, labor, and species. Ag monocultures disrupt native ecologies, excessively use chemical pesticides or synthetic fertilizers, overuse and pollute water, and perpetuate climate change through fossil fuel reliance. Organic agriculture, on the other hand, is shown to be regenerative and avoids many of these problems, but is fighting for a foothold against industrial agriculture, GMOs, and pesticide use that is at an all-time high. 

People assume organic produce holds a significant market share, but the Montana Organics Association reported that less than 1% of agricultural production in this country is organic, and accounts for only about 6% of consumption (meaning, antithetically, that we import about 5%). Numerous Indigenous tribes are working to call attention to traditional ecological knowledge and food sovereignty, which, by definition, mostly emphasize organic approaches. Conversely, agricultural regions that use non-organic practices, with high concentrations of low-income farmworkers almost exclusively from migrant Central and South American communities, report a disproportionate number of chemical exposures. Rogers has tried to address aspects of these crises through her work, promoting local, criticizing monocultures, advocating for seed saving, and encouraging reciprocity as guiding principles. 

Symbolic Potential 

Rogers decorates each piece with a plant’s shadow or silhouette, drawing on a near-infinite vocabulary of gorgeous leafy greens. In philosophical thought, including Hegel and Plato, shadows have strong symbolic potential as a tool for us to question reality, thought, essence, and what truths are—connotations that carry over into craft. Before the advent of photography, silhouette portraits of people were a way to capture their essential features, often in profile. Similarly, Rogers’ decorated vessels recall herbarium sheets, a way to preserve and present pressed or dried plants, that formed the foundation of botanical (and scientific) inquiry from the 16th century onward. Or perhaps sun prints, those blue cyanotype contact prints that capture essential characteristics through silhouette. Rogers’ plant silhouettes are also portraits, in a sense, of variety, abundance, and wellbeing. 

She has started using iNaturalist, a social-media network for sharing observations in the natural world, and digital image-editing software to expand her simple casting and tracing of shadows. She has become increasingly focused on an overall awareness of seasonality and plant growth as a calendar to which she aligns herself. She cites pandemic isolation as the revelation that allowed her to focus inward on her pots and her garden, because suddenly the garden was her most immediate and “direct connection to local food.” As a result, her work shifted to reflect what’s happening with a plant at a specific moment in time. 

Recently her plates—serviceable, combination thrown and handbuilt slabs—have begun to take their crenulated form from unfolded lettuce and cabbage leaves. Her newest glaze approaches fall into three categories. First, they more and more frequently depict companion plantings like nasturtium and kale. Secondly, plants that mature together are featured, such as early-season radishes and arugula. Finally, when the restriction of the pandemic lifted and allowed her to participate in a summer residency at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts last summer, she found that her approach was intensely local and she depicted plants in close proximity to her studio—chokecherry and crabapple blossoms, currant leaves, the false London rocket that proliferated in a dormant field. 

At the Bray, Rogers was excited because she started building more layers into the work including silkscreen prints of plants that add a shadow layer behind the foreground image, or by adding a textural shadow under the slip. She also complicated and expanded her glaze approach by silk-screening plants at different stages of growth—the plant in spring is often in the background, and the plant in summer is in the foreground, showing how one plant changed from spring to summer. 

Ground to Ground

Like any good agent of change, Rogers looks at systems. Farmers and gardeners know that growing starts with healthy soil. Sometimes it’s hard to believe that the ground beneath our feet is latent with the potential to change our lives, but it’s true. Soil is a system. When it is healthy and functioning optimally, soil abounds in nutrient and mineral wealth, teems with billions of microorganisms in every tiny handful, and positively impacts huge things like global diversity, the quality of human lives, and the climate! Healthy soil sequesters carbon, reduces erosion, maximizes water infiltration, increases nutrient cycles, and boosts antioxidant and anti-inflammatory phytochemicals in plants. This is something that Rogers has observed in her backyard garden. Jane Zelikova says in All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis, “A tablespoon of soil contains billions of microbes . . . [that] collectively hold more carbon than all animals combined. Billions of tons of carbon sit underground, three times more than in the atmosphere. Microbes are the movers and shakers of carbon sequestration . . . . Having more carbon in the soil is transformative. It means better water infiltration and higher nutrient and water retention. As soil health improves, agricultural fields become more resilient to climate change.” 

Potters also think about soil in the form of clay. Rogers is a materials enthusiast and describes the “ground to ground” relationship of the garden to clay, so much so that she acted as a “clay doctor” at the 2023 NCECA (National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts) conference, helping people tease out how the specific composition of their clay bodies helps or hinders the work. Rogers also builds and develops her own clay bodies, and when not digging her own clay, limits herself to materials that are as close at hand as possible, small mine operations processing a single material, and distributed without water to be pug-milled later. 

It is hard to consider any one of these issues separately. They form an interdependent, coupled system, the biosphere that is life on earth. Rogers’ work is a plea for holistic systems that decentralize production and authority, uphold localized design and practice, guard against overconsumption of a resource, and champion sustainability. Rogers suggests that if people can change their eating habits, we can change the world. “My current studio practice has a historical foundation that is deeply rooted in craft tradition. The choice I made to live my life as a potter has helped me to recognize that, although our individual food choices may seem insignificant, our daily interactions with food add up to a wider and more complex interaction with our local and national food systems. I absolutely love that the complexities of art and food can exist on the same plane. It is my desire to always use the physically combined beauty of handmade pottery and local food as an interactive tool; one capable of providing joy and value in our daily lives.” 

Building Connection 

That’s a tall order for a plate decorated with the silhouette of a leaf, but that’s exactly what she’s doing. A plate is a tangible connection at the nexus between food production and food consumption. Really simple, powerful tools can cause us to reassess our assumptions or practices and be visual reminders of our decisions or how we wish to live. Rogers is positioned, as all potters making utilitarian objects are, between the producer and consumer of food. The regenerative agricultural movement values community(ies) similarly to how the crafts do, connecting to people and place. At a time when potters (such as NCECA’s Green Task Force) are questioning sustainability in the form of material use and origin, extractive practices, firing efficiencies, and environmental impacts, Rogers is making work central to these issues, starting with the maker, but extending to the consumer. Her practice expands outward from pottery production to collaborations with farmers, gardeners, chefs, food influencers, lifestyle magazines, and families and friends to host dinners, hold events, and create conversations—inviting people in, where we all have a place at the table. 

Lindsay Rogers is a potter, educator, and gardener living in the mountains of East Tennessee. She earned her BA with a concentration in printmaking from Sarah Lawrence College in 2001, and an MFA in ceramics from the University of Florida in 2013. She has used her work as a ceramic artist to advocate for a more locally based, sustainable food system, and has collaborated with artists, chefs, food photographers, and farmers. She is an assistant professor of ceramics at East Tennessee State University. 

the author Brandon Reintjes is senior curator at the Missoula Art Museum. He is married to ceramic artist Alison Reintjes, founder of Grow Safe: Non-Toxic Missoula (www.growsafemissoula.org).