STEPHEN FREEDMAN

My grandparents emigrated from Russia to Africa to escape persecution. My father was an evolutionary biologist working in South Africa with Louis Leakey and Raymond Dart in the study of human origins. My mother was a ceramicist who introduced me to my medium as a young child.

In 1960 my parents moved to Australia to avoid Apartheid. In Sydney I was introduced to an oppressive colonial school system where I was punished and ostracized for my cultural differences. Moving to the United States in 1965 – a time of vast social change – I experienced liberation, and I began making pottery and sculpture in my mother’s studio. But in 1970, just as my new life began to feel real, my parents moved to Perth, West Australia. I was angry.

I attended two years of college philosophy and psychology at the University of West Australia, scraping by for a couple of years. Then I dropped out with the intention of becoming a farmer, but I supported myself by making pottery. Soon I moved to the Leschenault Peninsula near a town called Bunbury, a place so isolated that it was a six​

WORKING ON WAR SONGS

At the tail end of my time in Los Angeles I’d been writing a series of stories about my friend, Eduardo’s family, and their lives in and around the Aliso Housing Projects. One story I’d never completed was about his brother Victor who was a Vietnam veteran. The grief over his brother’s death had unleashed the buried pain of his war experiences for Victor.
He told me how his life had changed during his time in the Vietnam War, where he’d been ordered to fire on children. I wanted background for the story but he would say no more.
I was searching for someone to talk to me about what it was really like in Vietnam. Finally, I asked my L.A. art dealer, Grady Harp, who I’d known for many years, if he knew anyone who’d been there who might talk to me.
To my surprise he told me he’d been a surgeon in Vietnam. He said he’d send me some poems he’d written. Two weeks later, here in Hawaii, I found myself on my way back from the post office, reading his poignant works, tears pouring down my face…​
Grady visited for a couple of weeks, and over the coming months I generated a huge body of work. War Songs toured a dozen museums across the country. ​​

TRANSITION

The most immediate effect on my art of moving to Hawaii was a change in the relationship between my work and my writing. In L.A, my writing led the way for my sculpture. I’d published a few small books, and been asked to write movie scripts. My last major exhibition had been framed around the collection of short stories I’d written about the AIDS crisis.I arrived in Hawaii with my four-year-old daughter, Monique who’d been diagnosed with AIDS at birth. To my astonishment she was rejected from pre-schools because she had HIV. I realized I could no longer use my work to speak openly. I needed to protect her privacy. I felt gagged.My text-related work in clay ended. I wrote two books during my first years here, one compiling the children’s stories I’d written for Monique (which I didn’t release in Hawaii), the other a collection of fables based on my father’s work in evolutionary biology.When I returned to clay, it was, for the first time in years, without text. I had to discover new techniques, new processes, and new glaze surfaces, all to reflect my new relationship with my work – one that didn’t involve words but could still speak. It took two years to develop.When I was eight years old in Australia I would wander off into the bush. I would tie a rope to a tree and climb down cliffs, get lost in the scrub, cross rivers on fallen logs, stay there for whole days. I found peace and safety. There were poisonous spiders and snakes, but I found it much safer than being around people.The information that nature offers is massive, complex, diverse, but it made sense to me even then. I never understood people well, the way they ostracize and hurt others… The garden is a place I feel safe and normal. The first thing I did when I arrived here in Hawaii, was to start gardening. I never stopped. ​​

​ mile walk just to get to a public road. I didn’t own a car, a jacket, or even a pair of shoes. I built a house and a studio by the water, made of discarded lumber with a brick floor, without running water or electricity. I grew and caught my food. I began digging clay from a pit in the forest, throwing on a kick wheel, and wood firing pottery.

I spent five years in my studio beside the estuary modeling vessels on the wheel, seeking that perfect inflated shape that would stand as metaphor for a spirit I was trying to rebuild in myself. I needed to start at the beginning – a simple, pure, full form – like an egg.
In the forest I found a part of a life I wanted, but I still remembered my time in the U.S. as a time of freedom, so in 1979, at age 26 I moved to Los Angeles. I arrived with nothing. I lived in a garage at first, working as a laborer, but soon found work in a pottery factory, throwing mass-produced pieces.

As a profession wheel-throwing is very specialized. Once I’d mastered a production technique, I quit and went to another studio, and another. A year later, I was able to buy a wheel, build my own kiln, a rudimentary studio, and begin an exhibiting career once again.

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