For days I’ve worked on making faceted stoneware mugs with a bat wrapped around the handle. It’s a tedious process. The bat is cut from a paper pattern and the body is sculpted while the clay is still soft. Very thin coils are used for the bones in the wings. Before the clay is leather hard I drape it around the handle. Using soft coils and slip I join the wings to the mug. It will always be fragile but functional with care.
When I first moved to my home outside Asheville, NC there were bats living in my attic. I lay in a hammock as night fell and watched them fly. They are ghostly and very eerie. I find the wings to be one of the most beautiful structures in the animal world. Bats are the only mammals to have evolved wings. They appeared on Earth around 52 million years ago. They appear in stories of Mexican folklore as messengers from the underworld. Perhaps they still carry stories from our ancestors. Or so it seems to me.