I am Bart Decker, exploring ceramics as a way of understanding life from a quieter place.
Years ago, a failed spine surgery marked a turning point I could not have foreseen. What was meant to restore instead unraveled something essential, leaving me with chronic pain and a body that no longer supports me in ordinary ways. Sitting became something I lost. Even lying down requires constant adjustment and awareness. My days shifted into new forms, slower and more contained, where each action asks for care and intention. Life had to be relearned in its smallest gestures, and what once felt natural became uncertain. In that uncertainty, I came into direct contact with my limits and with the quiet demand to live differently.
In that slowing down, I found myself turning inward.
Meditation and Dharma, threads that had long been present in my life, became something more essential. They offered a way to be with pain without being defined by it, to observe the movements of the mind and its pull toward fear, resistance, and illusion without being carried away. Through reflection, silence, and contemplation, I began to relate differently to both body and thought.
A particularly deep understanding of silence came from a retreat at Moulin de Chaves in France, where I encountered not only stillness, but the living presence behind it. I discovered how silence, held with attention and intention rather than avoidance, reveals layers of experience that are easily overlooked in the chatter of everyday life. I became aware of the subtle sensations, the tremors of thought, and the meeting of body and mind as they unfold moment by moment. True depth arose from meeting experience with openness rather than pushing it away.
The teachings of Martin Aylward have been especially meaningful in shaping how I relate to practice and to life. Martin has been guiding people in meditation and Dharma for decades, and he co‑founded the retreat centre at Moulin de Chaves where I sat in silence. His work emphasizes embodied awareness and bringing mindfulness into the flow of everyday life, inviting an intimate, lived presence that extends far beyond the meditation cushion. His approach encourages meeting difficulty with curiosity rather than resistance and exploring experience with openness and tenderness.
Martin speaks to how awareness can become the ground of understanding, and how loving and caring response to what arises in experience is itself a form of practice and liberation. These teachings helped me see that the inner work of attention and presence is not separate from the forms my life now takes, but rather a living thread woven into the texture of each moment and each gesture of awareness, body, mind, and heart.
Ceramics entered my life from that space, through my girlfriend Steffie van den Akker. Her way of working with clay, her attention, and her sensitivity to the material opened something in me. In witnessing her process, I began to recognize that the silence I had been cultivating inwardly could take form through the hands. She showed me that clay can carry presence and reflect something deeper than technique or outcome. Through her, ceramics revealed itself not just as a craft, but as a continuation of the same path of inquiry and awareness.
I do not approach ceramics as a fixed identity, but as an exploration. Clay meets me where I am. It allows for a quiet dialogue between control and letting go, between intention and acceptance. Working with it becomes a continuation of the same inquiry, paying attention, noticing what arises, and staying with the process rather than chasing an outcome.
Often, the images of my work are accompanied by personal reflections that are not explanations, but extensions of the same process. They mirror the inner movement behind the forms and the small inquiries I carry into life, into perception, and into the subtle workings of the mind with all its patterns and illusions. Nature grounds me, Dharma gives direction, and the work itself becomes a meeting place for these elements. What I create is inseparable from how I live, reflecting an ongoing exploration of experience and the mind. There is no end point, only a path that continues to reveal itself, and I am not seeking perfection or arrival. I am simply exploring through clay, through stillness, and through life as it is.