I enjoyed writing “Raiding the Kitchen” so much that I wrote another article for Pottery Making Illustrated this fall. If I had had room, I would have written about Jacques Derrida’s concept of the Supplement from Of Grammatology, because it seems so apt for describing holes:
“[The supplement] adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest measure of presence . . . But the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace . . . if it fills, it is as if one fills a void . . . its place is assigned in the structure by the mark of an emptiness.”
I love that with holes, “the mark of an emptiness” is fullness, and that the void in this fullness is filled by subtractively adding emptiness.
But there were word limits, plus PMI didn’t seem like the right venue for lit crit, so I summarized the whole idea with just one sentence: “Holes enrich surfaces by adding absence.” Thus you can understand why I need to supplement the article with the words above . . .
Paley_ND21_PMIOriginally published in Pottery Making Illustrated, November/December 2021. http://potterymaking.org. Copyright, The American Ceramic Society. Reprinted with permission.