And in finding meaning in it, it is no longer accidental and disquieting, but rather presents a state of equilibrium.

Perhaps the artist has been trying to do both - accept the accident through finding meaning in it. The artist then emerges as a kind of shaman of the accidental, dancing between its acceptance and its control. Seeing in fire a parallel of the creative force itself, Heath argues that at the center of art lies a kind of “acceptance of the accidental” that is counter to the basic human instinct for controlling chaos. She lived nearly a century as an unstoppable creative force, touching millions of lives with her work that endures as the iconic Heath Ceramics.Īt the heart of Heath’s creative practice was the element of fire, reminding her always of a time when “the Earth was a red-hot molten mass of chemicals and minerals,” primordial and uncontrollable. In the final years of the war, she learned ceramic chemistry from an émigré physicist, then went on to revolutionize pottery with her alchemical approach to clay and glaze, becoming ceramicist and chemist, designer and inventor, idealist and entrepreneur, using the principles of science to place everyday beauty within reach of the working class. Largely self-taught, she spent WWII foraging materials from defunct clay pits closed during the war - brick clay from the Bay Area, talc from Southern California, fire clays from the Sierra Nevada foothills. Heath discovered art while studying to become a schoolteacher, then fell in love with the particular creative potential of clay. (UC Berkeley Environmental Design Archives.) That is what the visionary ceramicist Edith Heath (May 24, 1911–December 27, 2005) explores in a previously unpublished lecture titled “The Creative Accident.” Edith Heath at the wheel, 1960.

What is true of interpersonal love is also true of our labors of love - creative accidents are a mighty instrument of art, often steering entire trajectories of expression and endeavor in directions we could not have willed. “No one is fated or doomed to love anyone,” the philosopher-poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “the accidents happen.”

The Accident by A.M. Heath