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This year is the final year of my advanced ceramics diploma. The pace has been stepped up a notch and I make the trek in to the polytechnic three days a week instead of two.Two days are studio access days where I am busily refining my throwing skills and getting ready for a serious block of glaze testing. Fridays are spent in a classroom with a group of artists from all the other studio areas. It is a good mix of jewellers, printmakers,woodworkers and ceramicists.
Going into the studio for an extra day has thrown my schedule at home out of kilter and I know it will take me a few weeks to get used to it. I am surprised by the fact that it is nearly March, as time seems to be just racing away. I looked at my blog and thought, I need to let my internet friends know what I am up to and pfft another three days just vanished into thin air.
So here I am sitting here by myself in the quiet of the morning with the thoughts and words swirling away in my head. I keep on coming back to that blasted review and the phrase this is boring slides into my head. Once I start to second guess myself and lose the flow of the story the words start misbehaving and I struggle to string them together. Sorry.
Yesterday our theory group had a full day in the city visiting the museum, the art school, art forum and two exhibitions. It was a harrowing day emotionally as one of the exhibitions, Never Again, a photographic essay of the survivors of the Rwandan massacre was very confronting. As was the subsequent presentation about it and photojournalism. I haven’t fully processed the information and sorted it into its respective boxes in my brain yet. But I will do that here in the next few days, as I think my response to the photos of the survivors of the genocide in Rwanda needs to be shared.
So still reeling from the photo presentation we went up to Cast gallery in North Hobart to see an exhibiton by Vernon Ah Kee. This exhibiton was also very thought provoking and deserves a post of its own as well.
I am working through some ceramic ideas using the plaster slabs and I think I will spend tomorrow making and photographing a series of ceramic ideas. I should be doing the housework and laundry but instead I will be making a bigger mess of my already chaotic home. Oh dear.
My friend Robin Roberts, a talented photographer is going to send me some lovely landscape photos of Tasmania, especially for your viewing pleasure. Yay. These next photos are indicative of the type of work that he does. Robin is a recent arrival to Tasmania and as most people do he has fallen head over heels in love with Tassie and travels all over the place snapping away merrily.
I have been dreaming about the Dragon eggs. I keep on going back to the dragon post and re-reading all your comments and spinning off into wonderful daydreams. I have a couple of glaze combinations that I want to experiment with that should give me a lovely sparkly green. I am hoping to get the depth and surprise of an Australian opal. But the glaze might be too runny for an oval surface like an egg and might be better suited to the edges of a dead albatross bowl instead.
I start back at the studio this Thursday and I will be doing an awful lot of glaze testing to get the colours and textures of the eggs just so. I will keep you posted with photos of the tests.
I have been thinking a lot about the eggs and I don’t want to say that they are dragon eggs, that will be just between you and me. I want the people that see them and especially the children to make up their own minds.
Last Thursday “The Spouse” and I went down to the river. I had packed half a bag of clay in the car along with my rolling pin and a large board, just in case the fish weren’t biting.It is hard to concentrate on fishing when the ceramic juices are flowing so I rolled out a heap of clay slabs and pressed them into the rocks.
Here they are drying out a bit, so that I could safely transport them home.
Later on that evening I used the slabs of clay to make plaster press moulds.
Here are the finished press moulds. I have no idea what I am going to do with them yet other than some vague ideas of rolling the dragon eggs over them for some texture.I might press slabs of clay into them and use them as sections of the dead albatross bowls or for texture in a sculptural piece. The possibilities are endless.
I do know one thing for sure though, just looking at them makes me extraordinarily happy.
What colour do you think the dragon eggs should be? I was leaning towards bright colours. Not highly decorated like easter eggs which was my first thought but single colours,ranging from light blues and greens to reds and purples. Now I am not so sure, Veronica suggested light swirly pastels hmmm. I think I will nip over to Robin Hobb’s blog and ask her what colour she imagined her dragon eggs to be.
To answer Achelois there isn’t a shop at the sanctuary though I will be able to have a stall and sell my work there on the day. There will be stalls from groups like the Understorey Network and Weedbusters etc. I was a sensitive child as well Achelois, now that you have reminded me of that, I am thinking about the dead albatross bowls from the perspective of a child and maybe they might be a bit too much. I will see.
The annual fundraising open day for the Chauncy Vale Wildlife Sanctuary is this Sunday the 14th of February. I will go down there and hand over my proposal. I will check out the age range of the visitors, see where they set up the stalls,just basically do a bit of light reconnaissance. I will come home and in order to get the ideas straight in my head I will write about it here and then I will start making. Yay.
Another point I need to keep in mind as I am working towards this event is the very real possibility that I could design a wonderful one off series of work especially to be viewed in situ and the whole day could be cancelled due to it being a day of total fire ban. Australian summers certainly keep you on your toes.
River and Mrs C also wondered whether my work would be safe there.That is a risk I will have to take and one that I am comfortable with.The whole process of making ceramics is fraught from start to finish, there are so many things that can go wrong as you are making that I dont even worry about it any more. I just offer it all up to the universe and what will be will be.
I want people to be able to pick up my work and look at it closely so I will make the dragon eggs sturdy enough to be handled.I might even throw a couple of cracked ones into the nests as well.
Robin Hobb answered my question about her dragon’s eggs, I suspect that they’d be rather like turtle eggs, with shells more leathery than brittle. And camouflaged to blend in with the sand and protect them from predators.
Now I am thinking of leathery bands of texture on the eggs as well. Oh I am getting more excited about the dragon eggs than anything else. This year is going to be a good year but I will need to remember my key words, Focus and Resolution in order to take advantage of all the possibilites this year has to offer.
So tell me what you think about the colour and size of the dragon eggs, send me off on a zillion tangents with your suggestions.How would seeing a giant nest full of eggs make you feel? I have been hopeless answering my emails lately as well, sorry about that. I love reading them and I really mean to reply but I am off with the faeries at the moment with my head full of dragons and dinosaurs and beautiful blue bowls and oh look at that cloud where’s my camera…
There is a wildlife sanctuary just down the road from here and I have been mulling over an idea to have an exhibition down there for a while now.
My friend Dawn Oakford initially suggested the concept. Over the past four months I have gotten the idea out and poked at it, then I have put it away in the bottom drawer of my mind.
Next Sunday it is the annual open day at the sanctuary and I need to have a bit of a proposal drawn up for the committee. Typically I have left it to the last minute to put anything down on paper as I only have a vague idea of what I want to do.
I know that I want to make a series of bowls with questions written on them. I want to make people think about extinction. I want to appeal to the children that are there.I want my work to inspire the people that view it to start asking their own questions as they think about the the questions on the bowls.
So in order to get the ideas flowing I took three sample pieces of my work down to Chauncy Vale and photographed them in situ.
The dead albatross bowl looked really out of place on a nest of sticks. I need to make some dragon eggs for this spot. Some brightly decorated dragon eggs. Dragon eggs that have been inspired by Robin Hobb’s novels that I will enjoy making and that will be a bit of whimsy. I am sure that the children will think that they are dinosaur eggs and I am fine with that. Seeing a nest of giant eggs on the side of a bush track should inspire some questions.
There are plenty of places to stash some ceramic sculptures along the trail. Obvious spots like in a crack in this stone wall.
Or at the base of a tree.
There are also plenty of places to put my work that isn’t as obvious.
I have been making ceramic shells for a while now and I keep on covering these beautiful shells with graffiti. I decorate them with jarring colours and great black runny drops of glaze. As a species we seem to be hell bent on destroying beauty.Graffiti covered shells in a dry creek bed seems pretty apt to me.
The dead albatross bowls will feature prominently along with bowls like requiem for a tree and the useless residue bowls. So that is my idea in its rough draft format. What do you reckon?
Happy Birthday to me. I am 44 today. I am an Aquarian Fire Horse hear me snort. heh.
This is the year of the tiger and I can almost see the creative electricity in the air. I feel like I am on the cusp of a great adventure and all I have to do is be brave enough to grab hold of the tiger’s tail and enjoy the ride.
Grief manifests itself in many ways. One of the ways that my grief really had hold of me was through my photography. I just could not be bothered picking up the camera at all.There was a complete absence of joy in any photo that I took. I had even stopped taking photos of my grand children that was how deep my despair was.
Then my friend Robin came all the way up here and took me for a drive specifically to take photos. A wedgetailed eagle on a ledge was all it took for me to feel something, a spark of my old self returning.
In the same week along came the bloggies and an echidna. I had forgotten how much I enjoy sharing photographs of my part of the world. And you my readers, old and new have no idea of the enormity of the gift that you have given me. My camera is talking to me again and I feel a touch lighter for it.
I return to my studies next week and I am excited. This year is my final year with my tutor Ben Richardson and I am determined to wring every bit out of this year in the studio that I possibly can.
As a potter I find that I use an awful lot of plastic. Plastic to store my clay, plastic wrap to keep my work damp, plastic plastic plastic. So I am going to see if I can be plastic free in my work by the end of the year. Which leads me on to these stones that I found down by the river I think they will make nice tools to use with my work and the clay has to respond better to them than to plastic. We will see.
Now I am off to buy myself some birthday chocolate. Happy birthday to me.
