Ceramicist Susan Siegel’s vessels become whole when the living world is brought inside them and they gather more power with ritual use.

This article is dedicated to Rachel Harding

“I think Rachel passed away in a spiritual community that helped usher her into the world of the ancestors in a way that was right for her,” 

Susan Siegel

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SIDE BAR:

Rachel Elizabeth Harding (b - d) was a beloved colleague and sister figure to dear friends Marcia and Daniel Minter, co-founders of the Indigo Arts Alliance.  Susan Siegel and her wife Saundra Thomas had come to know and admire Rachel through their affiliation with the Alliance as a member of their Board of Directors.

Rachel Harding, PhD, was a poet, historian and scholar of Afro-Atlantic diasporic religions. She was associate professor emerita of indigenous spiritual traditions at the University of Colorado Denver and her research centered on how enslaved Africans preserved their humanity, personal agency and spiritual freedom through ritual and community.   MOVE THESE 2 PARAGRAPHS TO A SIDE BAR

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Susan Siegel and her wife Saundra Thomas were at their Belizean home when they heard that their friend Rachel Harding had gone into hospice. As a ceramic artist who creates vessels for ceremonial use, Susan created a clay pot to honor Rachel’s life and to help prepare for her transition. Using red clay dug up from Belizean earth, she hand-molded a small unfired ceremonial bowl embedded with seashells inspired by her visit to Rachel’s terreiro (sacred Candomblé community in Bahia) where monumental ceramic vessels stand in the courtyard, adorned with specific spiritual symbology (including seashell motifs honoring the sea deity (Yemanjá) and utilized for sacred offerings of rice, water and corn.  

ADD A PHOTO OF CEREMONIAL POTS IN THE TERREIRO

Saundra wrote a poem for Rachel which went into the vessel. They walked to the ocean to the sound of drumming and chanting. Then listened to Rachel reciting a poem from a podcast (Voices and Visions) THIS POEM/PODCAST CAN BE HYPER LINKED. “We wanted her to be there with us, to hear her voice”, Susan shared.

After lighting the combustible contents of the vessel on fire, they placed it on the shoreline and sat with the smoke and flames at the water's edge, watching the water come over it and eventually taking it back, symbolizing Rachel's spirit returning to the earth.  

ADD PHOTO OF RITUAL POT HERE

Earth Mama

Susan Siegel is such a “down-to-earth” person, that unless you know her well, it’s hard to fathom the depth of her achievement and breadth of her worldliness. Outgoing, open-minded, bubbly, easily approachable, no facades, keenly interested in you  whoever you are, and literally down (as well as in terms of personality), she’s a Brooklyn-based ceramicist who keeps a foldable shovel in her bag.

On the drive from the airport to her vacation home in Hopkins, Belize, along the roadside, where the mineral rich earth runs red, white, and black, she stops the car, gets out, and digs up wild clay. Where ever she goes, she’s on the look out for wild clay, the natural earth that she prefers to work with.  During a visit to The Legacy Museum in Montgomery, she took a walk and scavenged clay near a former plantation. She went on to create a pot using this soil, repurposing their spirit.

Her work is elemental  in the most literal sense. The elements that she works with — earth, water, wood, fire, and air, are incorporated into her work.. She, whenever possible, prefers firing her work in outdoor in raku, saggar, salt or anagama kilns.

(FROM MY ARTIST STATEMENT)

Her sculptures explore territory, identity, memory, and resilience. Drawing from African and indigenous knowledge systems, her work investigates the durability of African and diasporic cultures across time and space — and the ceramic form as a vehicle for spiritual growth and personal reinvention. Her totems and assemblages call out for ritual engagement, individual or communal. Her early work included facilitated ceremonial circles in which pottery served as a container: first for release, then for intention.

Siegel's process is itself ritualistic. As she works, she enters a deliberate trance-like state, and she feeds the clay — pressing corn, rice, and beans into its surface as elemental offerings. Seeds carry the archetype of the Divine Mother and the promise of ancestry. Corn mirrors cosmic creation. Rice, used across cultures in ceramics to invoke spiritual community and survival, brings patterns of abundance, fertility, and renewal into the surface of the work. These impressions are memory made tactile. 

She told us that her connection to the earth began with sticks in 1977 when she was 17 and went to University of Arizona from her hometown of Pomona, a suburb of New York City, which she referred to as “the epitome of mediocrity — I wanted to get far away from that place.” 

In Arizona, at the Grand Canyon, under the influence of psilocybin mushrooms, Susan found herself in conversation with three particular sticks lying on the canyon floor. The first carried the hard edge geometry of a  businessman with skin patterned like a Mondrian painting. The second, the mountain woman, was etched with flowing lines  The third had deep fissures like a troubled child. 

Stretching across four states, the Grand Canyon National Park is the ancestral homeland for 11 ethnicities including the Hopi, Navajo and Zuni. The natural grandeur and sacred feeling of that place was very powerful to young Susan. A shaman later told her that in a past life, she had been a leader on the Trail of Tears.  “I kept those sticks in a box for many years,”  she says. 

Susan Siegel majored in art and special education in college and taught hearing impaired, emotionally disturbed, and learning-disabled children in New York City.  The work was very rewarding because the benefits for the children were directly observable. 

This was the work that serendipitously changed Siegel’s life.  At the age of 25, she traveled with a friend through East and West Africa.  While in Abidjan, she encountered men, with polio, dragging themselves through the street on muscled arms and withered legs. Their eyes and smiles were penetrating.  She returned to New York unable to stop thinking about them. 

Utilizing her degree in Art and Special Education, she wrote her very first grant application. She proposed to establish an artisan center for the physically handicapped in Ivory Coast, where they could learn a marketable skill and earn a living. The following summer of 1986, she went back to Abidjan, knocking on the doors of the World Bank, the African American Bank, and various embassies to seek funding for her project.

As a way to connect to African artisans, Siegel joined up with a Parsons College program trip that brought American artists and educators to apprentice Ivorian artisans. They visited batik, lost wax casting, indigo dyeing, basketry, weaving and pottery villages. That’s how Susan found herself in the Baoulé pottery village of Tanousakassou, under the guidance of N’na, the chief of the pottery collective, and the woman she would come to think of as her African mother. The other Americans left after three weeks. Siegel stayed for two years. “I found myself under the spell of N’na, and clay” she says. 

“There was something that called out to me, and I listened, and I just knew I needed to stay there,” Siegel recalls.  I wanted to become part of the rhythm of daily life. “When we went to the fields, I wanted to dig, and they were like, no, it's too hard for you! At the end of a hard day's work, when she walked through the village, she recounted, “people would call out to me to show my blistered hands, and they would laugh and clap their hands!”

Siegel’s first pottery making tools were a stick and a stone. She learned to coil pots the way the Baoulé women had always made them.

The men dug heavy clay rocks from ditches in the surrounding fields and loaded them into metal bowls. The women, including Susan, lifted the bowls onto their heads and walked them back into the village in regal, straight-backed, single-file. Children pounded the clay into fine red sand with pestles.  The women added water, wedged the clay into balls and crafted the vessels.  

The villagers had built massive clay ovens the size of a large yurt to fire the work.  Lacking electricity or fossil fuels, they meticulously layered the clay pots with collected firewood. The process required sleeping around the kiln all night to keep the fires stoking at maximum heat, ensuring the clay reached temperatures high enough to permanently transform mud into durable pottery.

During her sojourns there, she lived in a courtyard with three generations of family, surrounded by clay in the most literal sense. The cooking hearths were sculpted from it. And each day N’na and her daughters repainted the hearth surfaces with a fresh coat clay.  “Imagine cleaning with mud!” Siegel exclaims.

The family cooked in the clay pots, drank from the cups, and ate from a communal plate shaped by the hands of the women. 

The villagers’ spirituality was also malleable.  “There was a little church in the village where they had the drumming, clapping and singing about Jesus.”  When Susan inquired about the Christian mix in with the traditional religion, they explained: “Jesus is just another good God to pray to. You never know. He has brought us some good things.”  

Susan’s happiest days ended bathing under open air, with a warm bucket of water and a sponge.

Meanwhile, she was also commuting back and forth between the village and Abidjan to form the cooperative of artisans with physical disabilities. “They joined me at many meetings and presentations with funders. We finally raised the capital for the Artisan Center, and with the help of an architect friend, were able to develop the plans to construct a building and realize a dream.”

After two years, Siegel returned to New York to complete her studies at New York University’s Gallatin Division, a division for self-directed students who design their own course of study. Her Masters degree, in Ethnographic Film and Global Education, featured a thesis paper entitled “How Artistic Expression is Integrated into the Daily Lives of the Baoulé People of Ivory Coast West Africa. An accompanying exhibition featured her batiks, photographs, and ceramics, along with her documentary film titled Mwala CnBa: “I left for a while but now I’m back.”

Susan Siegel went on to found Global Action Project, a nonprofit that trained young people to make films on social issues and use them as tools for community dialogue and action.  GAP produced more than forty films; and although she moved on after 12 years, the organization lasted 30 years before sunsetting in 2019.

Discovering that she was good at filling niches that needed to be filled and adding value to community, Siegel went on to launch a farmer’s market and a community garden and lead Flatbush Development Corporation in her Ditmas Park Brooklyn neighborhood.

Owning her identity as a “start-up entrepreneur”, she thrived on “the chase” and on building a strong foundation for new ventures. She has, among other things, raised funds for a school library serving bright young men of color at George Jackson Academy, and founded Brooklyn ARTery, a gift shop and arts space near her home in Ditmas Park.

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Studio snapshot and soundscape

These days, as a retiree, Susan has returned to her passion and her connection to Africa. She is fully focusing her life around clay.  When not traveling elsewhere, Susan spends considerable time in her ceramic studios in Belize and in NY, at Powerhouse Arts, on the 6th floor of a Brooklyn building with magnificent floor-to-ceiling arched windows that flood the space with natural light.

While she works, she listens to African, Cuban, Brazilian, jazz and hip hop that gets her “in the zone for creation,” she says.  “I envision viewers wearing headphones and listening to the same beats while they take in my pieces.” Sometimes the music gets her into a trancelike state and conjures up the ritual that she visualizes for someone with the pot in their home.

And to add another element to the article, we could also insert an audio (mp3) file with sampled excerpts from your playlist. —————HAPPY TO GIVE YOU A PLAY LIST!

“For example, my piece, Six Wishes. I envision that the owner has six wishes that they want to actualize. Maybe they project them on to each of those spheres in their mind and use the piece as a vehicle for manifesting those desires, whether personal, spiritual or political.  They can return to the piece, perhaps on an altar, and focus on their desires, working toward manifestation.”

INSERT PHOTO OF SIX WISHES HERE

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The work harvesting and turning wild clay rocks into usable malleable clay is an arduous process. The raw clay must first be pounded, sifted, slated, dried and wedged. Then it must undergo extensive testing. Susan evaluates elasticity, firing survival and natural coloration. She often has to alter the composition by adding elements like feldspar, silica, or commercial clay bodies to ensure elasticity.

She rejects shiny glazes in favor of matt, organic, and raw surfaces that lend themselves to the quality of her work. She often uses oxides (black iron oxide, spanish red oxide, cobalt, chromium) which she views as painting with the raw elements of the earth.

INSERT VIDEO and or PHOTO OF ME FEEDING THE CLAY .

The return to the Ivory Coast

In March 2023, Susan fulfilled a life-long dream to introduce her wife Saundra to the pottery village that instilled her love of clay. ( Unfortunately their daughter Calli could not attend). The visit was monumental. She was received with such love and joy. After 37 years, the villagers actually remembered her!  She brought along photo albums and they watched her Master’s video documentary. Word got out quickly and they all came around to search for faces that sparked memories that brought laughter and tears.

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To show her gratitude, Susan asked what she could do to support the pottery collective. There was little space to show their work; pottery was piled up with no place to walk.  The pottery collective needed a ceramic exhibition space. So they decided to give them the funds to build one. “This would call attention to the incredible work created there.” says Susan. Two years later the building was complete. Susan and Saundra returned to the village for the joyful opening, where hundreds gathered to celebrate with drumming, speeches and dancing.” The event was widely broadcast in all major newspapers and television stations throughout the country. As Susan stated at the opening, “It is our hope is that this exposition space will create many opportunities for the potters to form business relationships, sell more work and improve the economy in the village.”

ADD PHOTOS FROM THE VILLAGE OPENING AND THEIR POTTERY HERE>

Coming full circle: the Belize home and studio

The present looped back to reflect the past when Susan and Saundra built an ocean front home in Hopkins Belize. From the start, this Garifuna Village, populated by descendants of enslaved Africans, felt like home.

Working with a Mexican architect and Filipino contractor, they designed an ideal, integrated space where Susan can "float" between her pottery studio, domestic life, and the sea. The house was built entirely around the existing landscape, saving roughly 35 native trees from being cut down. 

Susan’s pottery studio opens onto a central "Story Garden” , a courtyard that the architect named after the owners' narrative-rich lives. Susan uses the Story Garden to dry ceramic pieces quickly and intends to utilize the space to build tall sculptural totems and functional plant vessels.

Living beside the ocean, she can walk the beach and collect ocean-worn sticks. And, as true in many agricultural areas, lighting fires in Belize is often practiced as a means of managing crops and recycling nutrients back into the soil. It is quite common to see the rising smoke and small fires while driving along Belizean farmlands, or in peoples’ yards, as a way to dispose of their trash.

Susan had been doing mini pit fires in her backyard BBQ appliance in Brooklyn to create surfaces that are earthy and natural.  Now she can perform clay pit fires in her Belize yard. Dating back over 30,000 years, pit fires bring out the natural elements of the clay. Carbon trapping caused by smoke and minerals surround the pottery, and the wood, sawdust and oxides create natural decorative black, grey, red and orange stains. 

The Metaphysics of Closure: Completing the Vessel with the Living World

Siegel fills the openings of her sculptures with sticks, vines, gourds, natural fibers, stones, and clay beads she makes herself. These forms are sourced from beaches, African markets, and roadsides off the beaten path. The natural materials are alive- they are objects with character, history and a story and they find a home in windows specifically carved to receive them.  

The physical act of closing her pieces with these elements is, she explains, simultaneously a metaphysical one: a connection to the ground, the earth and a completion of what clay alone cannot finish. The vessel becomes whole only when the living world is brought inside it.

Ceramic Vessels Historically Employed for Ritual Use 

Pottery has been utilized for ceremonial practice for thousands of years This extends from Africa to Asia. The forms and purpose resonate in Siegel’s work; her pieces have been utilized for funeral and rites of passage rituals. 

When a dear friend and village elder Sylvia Harris passed, Susan created a nesting bowl for her husband Gary. During the memorial, mourners wrote notes and placed them in the crevices between the layers of the nested bowls.  This experience was inspired by the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, where visitors leave prayers for their ancestors in the cracks of the wall.

Susan on Her Own Enacted Spirituality

When pressed  to define her spiritual framework, Susan concluded that her practice is entirely action-oriented rather than academic or theological:

My spirituality is the way that I live. It doesn't come from my head at all. It comes from my heart, and it’s an extension of my being... It's in my way of interacting with the world, with people, with nature, with clay, with everything. My connection to ritual-making and the spirit world is very rich and the clay work is my vehicle to express this deeply engrained part of me.

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Reference notes on Rachel Harding

Rachel Harding was a beloved colleague and friend to mutual associates including Indigo Arts Alliance co-founders Marcia and Daniel Minter (who also regarded her as a sister figure), and Susan Siegel and Saundra Thomas. She also was a vital multicultural bridge. Beyond the physical incarnation, Rachel endures brightly as the illumination that infuses memory with light. (insert transitional sentence) Her friend Susan Siegel makes pots which she says are “not vessels for liquid, but for light.”  

Rachel Elizabeth Harding, PhD, was a poet, historian and scholar of Afro-Atlantic diasporic religions. As an associate professor of indigenous spiritual traditions at the University of Colorado Denver, her research centered on how enslaved Africans preserved their humanity, personal agency and spiritual freedom through ritual and community.  Her intellectual rigor was enjoined with a poetic sensibility and a commitment to the Veterans of Hope Project, an initiative she co-founded with her parents, Vincent Harding and Rosemarie Freeney Harding, both notable figures in their own right.