Five years ago, Brent McCosker started making clocks out of clay.
The circular orbs, adorned with the hands that tell the time, fill shelves and several walls of his home in the hills near Saint-Jérôme north of Montreal.
The 64-year-old ceramist has always been fascinated by time. “I think it’s because my mother had no notion of time,” he mused, when I first asked him why he makes clocks.
He recalled a day in high school when he was out with friends and had to wait three hours for his mother to come pick him up. He ended up hitchhiking.
Brent’s life as a ceramist started at that time, at his high school in North Hollywood, California. “You [either] hung out at the pottery studio or in the back parking lot and smoked dope,” he remembers.
Later on, Brent McCosker found work throwing clay flower pots for 15 cents a pound. And after getting his master’s in chemistry, he turned around and worked full time as a potter for nine months.
“Our older son arrived and I thought, it’s time to get a legitimate job.”
When he and his wife Marie-France moved the family back to Quebec, where she grew up, art took a hiatus. They opened a business together and raised two sons, “Nothing happened for 15 years,” Brent says.
And then, in 2015, he bought a small kiln, the size of a mini-fridge, and started again.
In 2015, he began with cylinders like these. 
Brent’s kiln
On a sunny post-lockdown afternoon in June 2020, I took the bus up to Saint-Jérôme from Montreal to meet Brent.
He showed me around his studio. Several mugs were just coming out of the kiln. “Oh no!” Brent cried as he unpacked them. A whole line of text hadn’t made it through the firing ( “Bonkers in the Bunker” – a Donald Trump reference). Pottery is an intrinsically chaotic art.
The ceramics bake for seven hours at temperatures over 1000 degrees Celsius. “Every load is like an experiment … I have to accept that what is in my head is going to manifest itself differently,” he said.
I tried to ask about the meaning of it all, but Brent seemed to prefer to show me piece after piece, this one a commentary on Trump’s presidency, that one a reflection on the craziness of the art world, where a banana taped to a wall fetched $120,000. A larger, flat piece showed equations on a math professor’s blackboard, inspired by a New York Times article.
He hasn’t made a clock in some time, but instead moves from one idea to the next according to what inspires him in the moment. This past year, he made bowls, lamps, and 40-piece clay jigsaw puzzles, including one called “The Divided States of America.”
“I really work off ideas. I’m not a repetitive production maker. Even though when I do have an idea for a cup, I’ll make two dozen of them. And then I’ll move on to something else.”
“Right now for me it’s a real stabilizer,” he said, about his work. He used to work on the potter’s wheel, but now cuts up large slabs of clay and rolls them, which is easier on his hands. The pandemic has been an opportunity to focus. He also hopes to eventually sell his work.
Inspired by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan’s piece “Comedian” which consisted of a single ripe banana taped to the wall. The patterns surrounding the banana are the Morse code signs for “SOS”
“This is climate change warming. So temperature is represented by colour. So here’s the warming up till 2000. And after it’s a blank page, it’s up to us.”
Brent and some of his work in earlier years
Brent and Marie-France
– Leaving a mark –
Marie-France remembered a moment from some decades earlier. “When we got married, we were walking down the beach and he was just excited [about his art],” she remembered. “‘You need to leave a mark of your presence,’ he said. To me just being there was enough.”
“The medium that I’ve chosen is very long-lasting and that’s intentional,” Brent added. “I like that idea. You’re feeling immortal.”
“I learn something new every time we talk about [the ceramics],” Marie-France said, and described Brent’s artistic journey as “a search.”
“He gets somewhere.”
“I know something great will come out of it.”
Marie-France has rearranged the decor of the house to accentuate Brent’s creations, which are front and centre, inescapable, as you walk from room to room.
We ate a delicious homemade lunch outside, and ended up talking about my plans to move to Vancouver that fall to study theology at a seminary. Brent and Marie-France have two sons in their twenties, one of whom joined us for lunch, while the other lived in Europe. As we spoke, I couldn’t help but feel a kind of comfort in the couple’s energy, something wiser, older, more experienced. I felt young, searching, eager.
After lunch, the three of us went on a short hike up a small mountain nearby. Brent does the same walk once or twice a day. I struggled to keep up. He and Marie-France dropped me at the bus station afterward.
I wondered: What is it that will gently pull someone back to art, over the course of a lifetime?
I think it’s a worthy and noble path.
“I keep coming back again and again. I don’t find what I’m looking for,” Brent had said to me.
“Attention is the beginning of devotion,” says Mary Oliver.
Even if we don’t know what we want, we pay attention to what’s around us, and get inspired.
I thought of Brent as an explorer looking out into the wilderness, again and again. The clay that he’s been shaping has surely shaped him too.
“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” Alice asks the Cheshire Cat, in Alice in Wonderland. He responds: “That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.”
“I don’t much care where…”
“Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.”
“…so long as I get somewhere.”
“Oh, you’re sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.”
On the bus home, I thought of a question I could have asked Brent. Who would you be if you hadn’t made this stuff?
Perhaps he would not feel, quite as strongly, that he has lived, that he has scraped the sky.
Brent’s coronavirus trilogy of clocks – the virus overshadowing the planet
Many images courtesy of Brent McCosker
williamburr.wordpress.com 
Brent,
This is an old high school ceramics classmate of yours, Bruce Dickinson. I can’t find your number to call you. I don’t want to leave my number here but please email me so we could get in touch. We have a 50 year class reunion coming up. Glad you are still working the clay! Bruce. bndickinson@aol.com