A few days before his wife, Lori, died, Russell Wrankle applied for Family and Medical Leave from his teaching position at Southern Utah University. Emergency room visits had become too frequent for him to continue teaching, though the couple still hoped a new drug might extend her life.

Lori died a few days after his two-month leave began. Because FMLA covers caring for a family member but not bereavement, Wrankle would only receive a three-day leave. “I was prepared to go back into the classroom,” he says. “I wanted to, actually. I wanted my students, and my own kids, to see that you can live through the worst thing and still show up. But my department chair was the level-headed one and encouraged me to apply for FMLA again, instead, this time for my own mental health.”

It was approved by HR. But since returning after a two-month leave meant he be returning to someone else’s class mid-semester, he applied for an extension.

While he was “off” at SUU, however, Wrankle was very much “on” at Shape Theory, the Cedar City ceramics studio he founded. He had written before about processing loss with his hands in clay, alongside others at the studio who had experienced loss. What he wasn’t doing was performing his grief publicly.

“I didn’t post much or at all about Lori, my loss, on social media, and I’m still not entirely sure why,” he says. “Maybe because I didn’t want my grief to be monetized by META tech bros. Maybe because I didn’t want something that mattered so much, something sacred, to be a part of the outrage machine, or to just be part of someone’s scroll of boredom and indifference.”

Instead, he posted about the studio, its people and the joy he found in community. Then he was told secondhand that someone in the university administration questioned whether those posts showed enough grief to justify his leave. The message relayed to him was: “Be careful what you post, because it’s perceived that you’re taking advantage of the FMLA program.”

For Wrankle, the episode raised a larger question about what grief is supposed to look like—and what role making art might play in experiencing it. “You can still drive to the grocery store, push the grocery cart through tear-blurred vision, buy groceries, wipe away tears in order to see the label, and look forward to coming home and grilling chicken and raising a glass of wine to your grief and love,” he says. “You can still exercise daily and cry along with the effort.”

And you can still make art.

“What they also don’t understand is what art is for,” Wrankle says. “And when circumstances change, the purpose of art-making changes too, and for me, right now, art-making is a healing endeavor.”
So, while someone at SUU was apparently wondering what Wrankle’s grief should look like, he was conducting an experiment of his own.

There are memories from Lori’s final days—her suffering and fear—that remain intensely painful. Wrankle wanted to know whether spending a sustained period working with his hands and clay could alter the way he experienced those memories.

“The experiment was this. I wanted to test the idea that there’s a connection between working with your hands and touching material that can produce positive brain cocktails that make us feel better and contribute to our well-being.”

He spent a full day at the wheel, throwing plates, trimming cups and pulling handles: familiar activities requiring relatively little conscious thought, relying instead on muscle memory. During the work, he kept the most painful memories at bay.

At the end of the day, he deliberately summoned them.

“The hospice social worker told me, during Lori’s last few hours, that grief tears contain cortisol and that as those chemicals build in your system, tears are the release valve. When I thought about Lori’s past few days, the memories still hurt, and there were still tears, but the sharpest edges had been rounded off, and the pain was a little more tolerable, and maybe my tears, after a day in the studio, contained something else too. Tears of joy within the grief.

“And who’s to say that even in our darkest hours, we can’t be joyous and find beauty in our sadness?”

Russell Wrankle, “Candelabra,” 8 x 10 x 6 in. “Living in the liminal space, the shape of loss and love. Sometimes we have to go even deeper, into the negative space, where absence is the shape of beauty,” says Russell Wrankle. “Maybe that’s why I’m drawn to making candelabras. They hold light in the spaces between things. They bring people together around a table, making room for celebration, conversation, memory, and sometimes grief.”

A form of this article appeared in Shape Theory Ceramics’ monthly newsletter. For those interested in putting Wrankle’s experiment to their own test, Shape Theory Ceramics is offering two seven-week classes this fall. A wheel-throwing course meets Wednesdays, 6–9 p.m., October 28–December 16, while a slab-building series meets Tuesdays, 6–9 p.m., October 29–December 17. Both take Thanksgiving week off.

“When you’re touching clay, it has a way of bringing you back to yourself,” Wrankle says.

Each seven-week course is $320 and includes clay, glaze, instruction and tools.

Work in Progress

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