Are David and Goliath stories true? Can a humble insulator be considered among the ceramic greats? To answer, consider who made this specific insulator, when, and why.
During the 1980’s in Sandinista-led Nicaragua, the “Organizacion Revolucionario de Descapacitados,” or “Revolutionary Organization of Handicapped Veterans,” (ORD), ran a stoneware pottery shop as part of their rehabilitation training program.
Their clay came from a deposit near the village of El Sauce (“El Sow-se”) that displayed, along the length of a long gully, the entire erosion process from feldspathic rock, to white primary clay, to secondary ball clay, then to earthenware. Their glaze consisted primarily of dust from Momotombo, Nicaragua’s largest volcano.
Potters for Peace helped the ORD develop a project to produce ceramic insulators for a fraction of the price of existing insulators bought from Brazil. (I built a kiln with the ORD for this project).
A US-created coalition of political parties (an open reality in Nicaragua that included some bizarre bedfellows) electorally ousted the Sandinistas in 1990. An application for US Agency for International Development (AID) funds was quickly granted. The AID package included funds to purchase (only) US made insulators at four times the ORD’s price. With a stroke of a pen, the ORD contract was broken. Their pottery shop faced closure.
Potters for Peace mounted an awareness/fund-raising campaign featuring various elementary schools in the US asking the AID to amend their package to include ORD insulators. The kids raffled insulators and wrote letters to their representatives and to the AID. The campaign worked! The contract was (partially) renewed.
So once upon a time, a humble little clay object found itself smack in the middle of the Cold War. A small, impoverished country’s war wounded unwittingly found their gesture of self-determination pitted against an antagonistic super power’s economic might. With this ceramic insulator as their icon, the underdog won.
The moral of the story: Truly progressive, “politically inspired” ceramics efforts encompass projects well beyond the flash and glitz of protest, criticism, and confrontation. These powerful efforts can be found in the most unlikely of places.
This beautiful little ceramic insulator, my friends, is the real deal.
This Day in Pottery History 