If I think about how much I actually have to do in the next three months or so, I start to get a bit panicky. I have a bit of an “EEEK!!!” moment and my chest tightens up and I start to breathe a little bit faster. This feeling of being overwhelmed, of having far too many irons in the one fire lasts for a minute or so and then my laid back Aussie spirit kicks in and as I whisper, “She’ll be right” to myself I am fine again.
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A few weeks ago I attended a weekend ceramic workshop with two ceramic artists from Finland, Nanna Bayer and Riitta Talonpoika. I had never heard of these artists before the workshop but once I had googled their work I knew that I would come away from the workshop with a lot to think about.
I have played about with Neriage or coloured clay before but I have never really thought about it seriously. I tend to work intuitively and let the clay or the idea lead me. Lately I have been spending an awful lot of time thinking about the dragon eggs and the different styles of eggs that I want to make. As I want some brightly coloured eggs as well as some fossilised rock like ones, I knew that neriage would be a technique that I would use.
Here is a step by step process showing how I made a swirly patterned porcelain egg.
Weigh out approximately 500 grams (1 lb) of clay and press a hole into the centre of the clay. Add 2 level teaspoons of coloured body stain. These weights and measures are only a rough guide as I wont know what worked and what didn’t until the piece is fired.
Then add a dribble of water to the powder to make a paste.
You will notice that I am wearing gloves, this is because a lot of the materials used in ceramics are toxic and can be absorbed through the skin. I have consumed enough toxins in the last twenty or so years to last me a lifetime and I don’t need any more.
You now need to wedge (knead) the clay until all the colour is mixed through thoroughly. I spent all morning making coloured blocks of clay yesterday. I used varying amounts of coloured stain for each different coloured block depending on its strength. I would highly recommend taking detailed notes so that you can alter the weights of the body stain if the coloured clay fires either too bright or not bright enough.
Also clean hands and cleaning your work space each time you finish making a coloured block of clay is really important. I have accidentally put a green thumbprint on the blue and red blocks, luckily it was easy to remove but this kind of carelessness can potentially ruin a mornings work.
I wanted a dark blue, sky blue and white egg to start with so I made a layered block of clay by putting slices together side by side. The pretty mauve colour will fire to an almost navy blue.
I banged the clay around a bit on the table to squish everything together. Then I sliced the block in half and started the process of carefully wedging the clay together.
I wanted a swirly pattern so I kept on wedging the clay until I was happy with the colour balance.
Once I was happy with the colour balance I put half the coloured block of clay aside for later and I cut the remaining block in half again.
I then put slices of plain porcelain with slices of the coloured porcelain together.
And started the process of mixing them together all over again.Once I was happy with the colour ratio of navy blue to sky blue to white I made two pinch pots.
Notice the scoring on the top of the pots, that is to help the pots join together. I slapped some slip onto the scored edges of the pinch pots and stuck them together and shaped them into an egg shape. I made a small hole with a needle on the base of the egg so that the air can escape when the egg is being fired. Otherwise the egg will explode.
Tadaa, the first experimental Neriage porcelain dragon egg. I say experimental because I don’t know if the porcelain will hold its shape when I fire it or not. These eggs are about the size of a goose egg at the moment and they will shrink down to smaller than that once they are glazed and fired. If the porcelain eggs dont work properly I will just use white stoneware clay.
I have made some similar sized eggs using CRT, a lovely robust stoneware clay that I use to make my platters. These eggs have a twofold purpose, first and foremost I will use them as test pieces to see how the porcelain fires, see what glazes work, that sort of thing. But their secondary purpose and the one that will give me the most pleasure, is that I want to be able to give these away to anyone who wants one as a memento of the open day next February 2011.
I also need to make a hammock to keep the eggs in so that they don’t get a flat spot as they are drying out. These are in a nest of old towels inside one of my slump moulds in the middle of the lounge room floor, which is okay as a temporary measure but it makes things a bit squishy inside the house. I want to have about fifty of these smaller eggs ready on the day so I best jump off the computer and get making.
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Yesterday was my last class with Dr Christl Berg. I cant remember the exact title of the class but in a nutshell Christl’s class was all about developing ourselves as artists as well as learning to look at art critically. It was a valuable experience as we had lots of presentations from established artists describing their own art practices.
Our last presentation yesterday was from visual artist, Glen Dunn and I had a lightbulb moment during his presentation when Glen said,”That in essence, artists are thinking in public.” I realised that is what I am doing, I am thinking in public, I am having a public conversation with you. I know it looks glaringly obvious but I hadnt actually thought about it that way before. A couple of pieces of the puzzle clicked loudly into place yesterday and my mind is buzzing.
My proposal for the sculpture trail has been accepted by the friends of Chauncy Vale committee and I am really excited and terrified at the same time. Now I have to do more than actually think about making the eggs, I have to produce them. Eeek.
Just to add more excitement and terror to the mix, yesterday Glen also suggested that I should film the whole process. I was going to photo document everything anyway but making a short film has captured my imagination. I have absolutely no idea how I am going to go about it at all but the thought of making a film is really exciting.
Now back to the idea of thinking in public. I hadn’t really thought much about the oil spill in the gulf of Mexico other than general, “gosh that’s awful” type of thoughts until I followed a link on twitter to the Boston.com’s Big Picture, News stories in photographs and the images truly brought home to me the devastating impact of this massive environmental disaster.
The dragon eggs are a very public thought. The dead albatross bowls are very public thoughts. And now I want to make a couple of oily dragonfly plates. This dragonfly is trying to clean itself while it is perched on an oil soaked blade of grass. I cant get the idea out of my head that to the executives of companies like BP and Monsanto we are as worthless to them as insects.That the destruction of our environments dont matter as long as they get their fat paychecks and the shareholders get theirs.
How can BP compensate the world for the loss of a dragonfly? How much is a dragonfly worth?
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Time is getting away from me. It is racing away at an alarmingly fast pace and it feels like there just aren’t enough hours in the day. I have been in touch with the trustees of the Chauncy Vale wildlife sanctuary and they are still very keen for me to make great piles of dragon eggs and leave them all about the place. I have asked a couple of other ceramic artists if they would like to display their work at Chauncy Vale next year and luckily for me they have agreed. Yay.
I have to write up a brief proposal before the committee meets later on this month, so that they have something on paper and then it is really time to get serious about making.
My initial idea was to slipcast the dragon eggs but I had a bit of trouble making the model. One clay model looked like a giant pod thing, another looked like a tic tac. I was finding it quite hard to get the shape that I wanted and the fact that it is absolute chaos in the studio at the moment wasn’t doing my head space any favours. I thought about casting a football and then modifying the mould to make it more egg like but it was just all too hard.
In the end I asked David for a condom and we filled that with plaster and then I gently shaped the wet plaster until I had an egg shape that I was happy with.
I am in two minds whether to leave the imperfections in the model or not. I am not sure. I think it adds character to the piece but whether I want fifty eggs with the identical marks is another matter totally.
Once I had overcome the initial hurdle of making a prototype egg everything started to fall into place. I dug out a bag of really gutsy, grogged clay and made two hand built eggs.
I made these by making two pinch pots and then joining them together and shaping them into an egg shape. I textured the eggs by rolling a rock over them and I have also pressed a piece of bracken fern into one egg as I am experimenting with trying to get a fossilized look. These two took about forty minutes each to make and I don’t think I will be able to make more than two or three at a time as my wrist was really aching afterwards. Now that I have made the first clay eggs the ideas are racing through my head and I feel like I have a bit of forward momentum now.
On twitter yesterday I saw an interesting tweet talking about an Art Swap.So I clicked over for a bit of a look and the idea has captured my imagination. Here is the opening blurb on the web page.
Artists:
On Twitter, I am promoting an art swap as a way for artists to share with and collect from their peers.
As artists, we often appreciate other artists’ work, but do not actively collect.
This is a way for us to give to others and collect beautiful art at the same time.
This is a way to inspire others… to build our community worldwide… and encourage others to create.
I joined up immediately and here is the link to ART SWAP if any artists out there are interested.
So that is where I am at with the Dragon Eggs at the moment and as I was wandering around outside yesterday the ducks were following me hoping for a snack. This one was even smiling for the camera.
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On the last day of class before the Easter break our tutor Ben Richardson organised a field trip for us near Clifton beach. One of the aims of this trip was to see where Ben gathers his raw clay so as to get a feel for our chosen material in its natural state.
We all met up at Ben and his lovely partner Peta’s home, where Peta had cooked us hot cross buns for morning tea. Then it was off down to the foreshore to walk to the clay fields.
The group split into factions, as groups do. There were the power walkers who strode briskly off into the distance, the balance of the group who walked along at a normal pace, the dawdlers and then there was me.
I had warned Ben that I wasn’t much of a walker and that I would whinge and moan and carry on. I could tell that he wasn’t sure if I was serious or not and I was happy to leave him wondering. Heh. I knew that I wouldn’t whinge too much as I enjoy walking but I am seriously unfit and my knee generally gives me heaps of trouble.
Ben set a cracking pace, as we needed to get to the clay field before the tide came in and I was reminded of a sheepdog trying to round up and hurry along a mob of recalcitrant sheep. He hid his frustrations well and politely told me on more than one occasion, that there would be plenty of opportunities for photography once we got to our destination.
Of course I didn’t listen as I know that a photograph lost is never found again. But I did try and limit myself to only taking a few shots as we walked along the beach.
At about the halfway mark the terrain started to change and the sand flats gave way to a rockier shore. I wished that I had thought to bring a wheelbarrow with me as there were Dragon eggs galore on the ground, but of course it isn’t everyday that you have a wheelbarrow lurking in the boot of your car *sigh*
As I was walking along the beach I looked at the tyre tracks in the sand, the occasional piece of plastic rubbish and other evidence of human occupation and environmental degradation and my mind began to wander. I thought about my planet and the fact that a lot of people don’t seem to realise that it is a closed unit. That my lifestyle here in Tasmania, the products that I use can affect someone in the North pole. I thought vague thoughts of extinction and apocalypse, I pondered the implications of the end of the Mayan calender in 2012 and I wondered what had really happened to the dinosaurs.I was thinking about the fossils that were being formed today and as I thought about this Earth in a million years time, a geological blink of an eyelid, I started to feel depressed.
When we reached our destination Ben wanted us to make a transient art work. A piece of work that we would leave in situ, we could use the materials at hand however we liked and we had approximately an hour to play around.
These next series of photos are some of the sculptures that some of my fellow students made.
I wandered off from the group a bit and started to set up my own transient work of art. As I threw rocks into the water I photographed the splash, the ripples and then the calmness as the ocean smoothed herself back out. As I photographed the results of my effort I thought that it was an apt metaphor for the transience of human life and endeavour. As a species we disturb the environment around us but at the end of the day when we are gone The earth will still be here and eventually she will erase the more obvious traces of our habitation.
As I wandered back to the group, one of the first year students, a recent arrival from the mainland, asked me if I had fun playing. I responded rather heatedly that I hadn’t been playing and I tried to explain what I had been doing but as per usual when I am feeling vulnerable I reverted to flippancy and I could tell that I had lost her. So in the spirit of continued flippancy I made another small work of art, which I called Look at what we do.
I have been writing this post for a few days now and I will stop here for the moment. Today is my Mother’s birthday and I am starting to have a sad day. So instead of finishing this post properly, I am just going to leave you with another photo.
I took this the other day and I really think the male grasshopper is telling me to piss off and leave them to it.
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