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.
In the Greek mythology, Sisyphus was a king who was cursed to roll a huge boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down, and to repeat this throughout eternity.
A beach cleanup on Midway Atoll made us feel just like Sisyphus.
There are millions of tons of plastics present in our oceans, and these are constantly fragmenting into smaller and smaller pieces which are scattered throughout the water column and present, in different densities, throughout all the worlds oceans.
Contrary to what many people believe, there are no visible islands of trash anywhere –even if some areas, the gyres, accumulate higher densities of plastic pollution. In actuality, what is happening is much more complex and scary: our oceans are becoming a planetary soup laced with plastic.
To make thing worse, these tiny pieces of plastic are extremelypowerful chemical accumulators for organic persistent pollutants present in ambient sea water such as DDE’s and PCB’s. The whole food chain, invertebrates, fish, sea turtles… are eating plastic and /or other animals who have plastic in them. This means that we are. Like the albatrosses on Midway, we carry the garbage patch inside of us.
Cleaning up this mess is not feasible, technically or economically. Even if all the boats in the world were put to the task somehow, the cleanup would not only remove the plastics but also theplankton, which is the base of the food chain, and is responsible for capturing half of the CO2 of our atmosphere and generating half of the oxygen we need to breathe.
But even if this problem was solved too somehow, the amount of plastic that we could capture, at an immense cost, would be a drop in the bucket as compared to the amount that flows into the ocean every day.
No matter how hard we push, in terms of technology or money, the boulder will be rolling back down the hill, throughout eternity, unless we stop putting more plastics into our environment.
The good news is that we can do this. We can do this now. We need to start a social movement that spreads virally and creates a critical mass of concerned citizens who pledge to move away from our disposable habits, and who raise their voice to reject and reverse a throwaway culture that might be profitable, but whose consequences are intolerable.
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You my dear readers may do the same. Please lets see if we can get this message out to as many people as we possibly can. I know that I can’t stop the polar ice caps from melting but I can drastically reduce the amount of plastic that I and my family use.
The past week or so I haven’t had any words. It took me three days to write my previous post and each word was a struggle.I just kept on plodding along adding and removing photos, adding and removing sentences, fiddling with the structure of the words until I was sick of the sound of my voice.The post still feels stilted but that is just me being picky.
Now the words are tumbling around in my head clamouring to be let out to play and I need to be quick or I will lose them all again.
My plate received an honourable mention in the plate a day contest. I was thrilled to bits. As an artist I am hyper critical of my work and once I saw the qualityof the other submissions I very nearly deleted mine. I am glad that I didn’t but it was touch and go there for a bit.
The spouse and I went salt water fishing yesterday. Normally I am a keen angler and the spouse and I have a healthy rivalry going but lately I have been getting a bit bored with it. The tide was very low and I was beachcombing along the shore looking for interesting rocks and things to use with my work.
I find that I am increasingly steering away from plastic and steel tools. I was picking up pieces of flat stone and thinking about how they felt in my hand.I liked how they felt like a natural extension of my hand and I knew the clay would like them too.I intuitively knew that the clay would respond better to these tools than to plastic or steel ones.
There is a dark, racist history in Tasmania and it is still there just under the surface bubbling away. In these sanitised days of political correctness you could look around and see a polite civilised society that on the surface mouths words of care and concern for the environment and each other. But travel a bit deeper into the heart of Tasmania, scratch beneath the surface a bit and you will find that racism and contempt for the environment is well and truly alive and thriving.
I find it very interesting that the mia mia was found on private land that was earmarked for logging. Forestry Tasmania had temporarily halted plans for logging that particular coupe until archeological surveys and heritage assessments could be done, and then bugger me dead if it isn’t destroyed.
It is very easy for me to surmise that a couple of ‘good ole boys’ drinking at the pub would think, “Bloody abos and fucking greenies aren’t gonna stop us from making a living”. Fuelled by alcohol and contempt they decide to solve this little problem on their own. No mia mia anymore, problem solved. Of course this is just a theory but the talk in my local watering hole goes along very similar lines.
… if the methane produced by Australia’s 80 million or so sheep was reduced by just 10 or 15 per cent in the next decade, it would have “a substantial and also a long-term impact on our greenhouse gas emissions.”
All those climate sceptics in the Liberal party should be rubbing their hands together with glee. It is sheep that are the problem. Not the great big polluting industries at all. We dont have to worry about reducing our emissions.We can stop calculating our carbon footprints. We can just keep on merrily consuming away
All we have to do is get rid of the sheep. Or stop them burping at least.
As I was working I only had a vague idea of how I was going to glaze the bowl, because at the time the making of the bowl was paramount. Everything else was secondary. I am learning to think about glazing as I am working with the raw clay but it is hard to think that far ahead, as the making consumes me.
Once I had finished the bowl, I began to think about glazes and the overall effect that I was after. I initially decided I wanted a shiny glaze over the bird which would highlight the plastic and I wanted a duller matt blaze over the background for extra contrast and to sort of imitate a sandy beach.
I roughly painted a Ruth Langman clear glaze* over the albatross when the pot was dry and this was fired to bisque.I changed my mind about the matt glaze for the background and decided to go with a shiny, honey coloured, sort of crackley glaze I have called Shannon’s Special* The bowl was then fired in oxidation to 1280° celcius
As a prototype bowl I am thrilled to bits with this piece, it has given me a lot to think about.I have another dead albatross bowl in the kiln at the moment, that has been glazed wholly with Shannon’s Special. I am really looking forward to seeing it on Friday.
