Sabine’s bowls – a chance encounter of the Glen Arbor kind

By Joanne Bender
Sun contributor
It was serendipity.
And also fortuitous, that I should meet Raku ceramic artist Sabine Rodatz just as I was reading Sue Bender’s Everyday Sacred, A Woman’s Journey Home.

It happened that friends, along with my husband and I, were drinking coffee at Cherry Republic one summer evening recently and taking advantage of the welcoming chairs and ambience of the Lake Street Studios patio. Soon silversmith Ben Bricker appeared. He explained the smell of smoke coming from the yard next to his workplace. It seems a group had gathered to witness Raku pots being fired in a special kiln. The artist creating the pots was there as overseer of the firing. This was Sabine Rodatz.
Bricker invited us to meet her, which we did. What a delightful encounter this was. We discovered a sensitive, soft-spoken woman who told us tales of her pots and bowls, proudly showing some of them to us. We saw all shapes and sizes of bowls, small and bigger; some trays with delicate designs etched and/or burnished with sticks or river stones.
I saw “Begging Bowls”. The very imperfections of the smaller bowls delighted me.
Meet Sabine Rodatz. Her youth was spent in Cuxhaven, Germany, west of Hamburg. She came to the United States with a friend from home, to travel in the United States for six months, eventually settling in Bloomington, Indiana, where she was married, raised two sons and attended the University of Indiana. Prior to becoming a ceramic artist she created a graphite pencil drawings and was a painter.
Something happened in her life a few years ago that changed that. She needed a new outlet for her talents. When a friend suggested she turn to clay as her media, she tried it. And enjoyed it. She has been building Raku pots ever since.
Memorial Day weekend Rodatz came to the Cottage Book Shop in Glen Arbor, where she met bookseller Barbara Siepker. Siepker told her about the possibility of renting the little cabin behind the Studios. The owners said it was available and Rodatz moved in. When someone else was scheduled to rent the little house after she spent a few weeks there, Rodatz felt she was not ready to go home … not just yet. So she found other living quarters and stayed here all summer. She plans to return next year.
Her impressions of Glen Arbor, the Sleeping Bear Dunes, the walks along the Lake Michigan shoreline, the people she has met and the friendships she has made have grounded her here.
“I concentrate on creating my clay pots by using the hand-built method,” says Rodatz. “My recent work consists mainly of pinched pots and slab built forms. Interiors are just as important to me as exteriors.
“The technique of Raku firing gives me the opportunity to create simple shapes in black smoky colors with minimal decorations of brushed and poured white crackle glazes. The unpredictable lines of crackle glaze, created by fire and reduction, remind me of ancient Japanese tea bowl designs – and also of growing up on my grandparents’ farm in the northern part of Germany. Seeing patterns of paint peeling from old barn windows, of the used and weathered handles of garden tools, of the texture and tactility of soil, of cracked wooden beams, of the arbitrary patterns in dried out ponds, of wavy ripples on mud flats created by wind and water. These are the images that I translate into my ceramic pieces.”
Back to Sue Bender’s book, Everyday Sacred, (which I initially perused because we share the same last name, though I doubt we are related. Bender begins her book by saying, “This story is about a bowl. A Bowl waiting to be filled.” She had read M.C. Richard’s Centering, a book about clay and art and life. He wrote about a man who said he wanted to “roam the countryside like a monk, holding a begging bowl, having it filled with what he needed for the nourishment in his life”.
Bender felt a kinship with making Everyday Sacred and the begging bowls. The monks depended on bits and pieces of food placed in their begging bowls for their meals. And they knew there were other kinds of nourishment as well, which would also fill their bowls.
From Bender we learn of patience and acceptance and that the small things in life are big in importance. We learn to look until we fully see. We fill our begging bowls with chance encounters, by receiving gifts of smiles, by filling our bowls as we do our minds, with small meaningful gestures of kindnesses from others.
Some ingredients to fill the begging bowls, from author Bender, include “The best of what we are is more than enough”, and “I don’t think we have time enough to waste being unhappy”.
And when the bowl is full we empty it, as we do our minds, not forgetting what was put in but going on to the next day, recognizing familiar sights each day with new vision.
We learn to fill others’ begging bowls daily, too.
As ceramic artists Bender and Rodatz are forming bowls that represents each artist’s individuality. “The Zen tea bowls are uneven, imperfect, like us,” says Bender, “and the tea bowls, like us, are revered just as they are.”
“My goal is to move away from the precision and symmetry of wheel/thrown vessels,” Rodatz says. “I shape my pots with the Japanese aesthetic of Wabi Sabi in mind. This is the idea of being incomplete, imperfect and impermanent, which is a major theme that I apply to my work.”
“One day, in search of something else, I found a book called Wabi Sabi,” writes Bender. “Wabi Sabi are the Japanese words for a feeling, an aesthetic that is hard to describe. I read: ‘Wabi Sabi is a beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. It is the beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional.’”
Without conscious awareness of the other, Rodatz and Bender could be soul mates, it seems to me. So I gifted Rodatz a copy of Everyday Sacred, of course. More serendipity…
In her poem”Gestern. Heute. Jetzt” (“Yesterday. Today. Now”), Rodatz writes: “Esthetical, enchanting, / beautiful and distinct, / symbolic – inspiring. / Vessels of clay. / earth. / Harmonic and well-balanced colors. / reflecting light. / Pewter grey, teak brown, beige, rose and sepia, / mat and lustrous, / in reduction – technique glazes / with grey/brown speckles, / arbitrary, / as created by the heat of the flames / in the process of kiln-firing, / markings flowing into each other – / uneven – wild.”
Rodatz is leaving Glen Arbor soon, returning to her home in Indiana. But she will be back next summer. She arrived as a visitor and will go home as a summer resident of Leelanau. I have a begging bowl, which she created, and I will fit it each day with experiences, encounters and serendipity, nourishment for my soul.