Diabolical Clay

I need to write a quick Artist’s statement for the upcoming exhibition. So what better place to practice writing it, than here on my blog.

It is hard to maintain a steady flow of words though, because as I am writing this I keep on having to tromp through to David’s room to rouse him out of bed for school. The words are whizzling around inside my head as I prepare his breakfast and I have to be careful not to put butter in his coffee and sugar on his toast.

An hour and a half later and Dave has left  for school and I have a small window of opportunity to write something halfway decent before the phone rings and I lose my train of thought completely.

I lifted bits of this next paragraph straight from my Boganvillainy blurb. All I have to do is elaborate a bit more without sounding like a complete tosser.

I am a ceramic artist and when my hands are filled with clay, I am able for a short time to forget my despair and shame, that I am a silent witness to the destruction of Tasmania’s spiritual heart.

The thought of ancient forests being turned into woodchips chills me to the core of my being.What madness this is, that we have become so anaethesised in in our lives that we squander so lightly our grandchildren’s legacy.

In this exhibition, “Perspectives of Fire” I have entered two completely different bodies of work.The handbuilt bowls hold my despair.The slipcast cups and bottles contain my hope.

If I allow myself to think too deeply about our poisoned waterways and smoking forests, I will be paralyzed with grief. As my tears mix with the clay and the forms come to life before me, the despair loosens its grip on my soul and I allow myself to hope

I have  now emailed it off to the exhibition co-ordinator.It is done. So what do you think, do I sound like a complete looney? Or will it do?

I know that is very easy for me to say. I am a middle aged eccentric who is living her dream. It hasn’t been easy, in fact it has been very hard, but last night driving home from Chris Jordan’s lecture I knew that the spouse and I had made the right decision all those years ago, when we decided to live an alternate lifestyle and live as greenly as we possibly could.

Confused?

Here is the back story. A very,very condensed back story.

Twenty odd years ago Mum gave me a piece of land, this piece of land. The spouse and I decided that we couldn’t commit to a bank loan as his work was too unreliable, he was a professional fisherman at that stage. So we decided to build our home room by room as we could afford it.

It was a very,very conservative rural area then and I was quite a radical greenie. We were living in a converted bus, with a small shed that served as a kitchen and bathroom combined. Our electricity came from a series of extension cords connected to a temporary power pole and we didn’t have running water inside.

We very quickly earned the nickname “those ferals up the hill.” For us, the local tip was an open face treasure trove of  building materials. If you didn’t mind sorting through the mounds of rubbish to get to them there was treasure galore. Huon pine windows and convict bricks, baltic pine planks and velvet armchairs all mixed in with dead sheep and disposable nappies. Of course the locals noticed that we were at the tip a lot and they shunned us.

If we ran over a wallaby we would stop and pick it up and so we also gained the cruel reputation of  “eating road-kill”.

I was obsessive about the fact that the children were always spotlessly clean and immaculately dressed out in public.I didn’t care how I looked, odd socks and mismatched hippy/punk/thrift shop was my style of dress but the children were always dressed ultra conservatively. I was terrified that child protection would take them away because we were living in a  bus and a shed.

Primary school was difficult for the children as they were regularly harassed because we didn’t have the latest gadgets and weren’t up to our eyeballs in debt like everyone else. The fact that the spouse didn’t have a regular job was also a heinous crime apparently.I also had some strange ideas about only eating ethically produced meat and horror of horrors I taught my children to loathe Macdonalds.

Now looking back I don’t regret any of the choices that I made. The house is nearly finished and it is built from  90% recycled materials. I have raised two strong willed children who are independant free-thinkers. Though raising your children to question authority and to not believe what they are told, made for some interesting discussions when it was my authority they were questioning.

Which brings me back to the lecture last night.

Chris Jordan’s  message of sustainability was made even more compelling with the addition of his powerful images. Plastic is killing us. Our mass consumption is killing the planet. It is that simple. The buck stops here with me. Right now.I am going to reduce the amount of plastic I use. Starting today.

I could waffle on for ever but today I have written enough. I will continue this story in the next few days. Chris Jordan has given me permission to use his images, here on my blog. So as you watch this clip remember that it it is our plastic that is in the belly of these birds .

Yours and mine.

My plastic is killing the planet.

The first sentence of the opening paragraph sets the tone for the whole piece of writing that follows. This is even more true for a blog post where lots of people don’t actually read the whole post. The opening and closing sentences give the skimmers a point of reference to frame their questions or comments.

Sometimes I will sit here and the words just spill out onto the page faster than I can type them. The piece of writing takes on a small life of its own and all the words fit together nicely.

Other times I will be interrupted and lose my train of thought so many times that, I either just give up and save the piece to my drafts folder or I struggle along clumsily, placing all the wrong words in a crooked line.

Often I will read something my daughter has written and the powerful beauty of her words will take my breath away. I will start to cry as I nod yes to her words, and then with her pain ringing in my ears I end up here trying to articulate my own.

Veronica will be 21 on Thursday. Veronica’s 21st birthday was the milestone that Mum was aiming for. I am struggling to contain my bitterness that we lost Mum to a cancer she should never have had. I am so sad for Veronica that her birthday will be such a difficult day without Mum.

Normally we would have planned a celebration. There would have been lots of food and music, laughter and joy. Now there is only sadness and ashes.I am bitter that the joy has been stolen from my child.

Veronica and I are going out for lunch to our favourite Japanese restaurant tomorrow, just us two together.

Tomorrow is Remembrance Day (11 November) marks the anniversary of the armistice which ended the First World War (1914–18). Each year Australians observe one minute silence at 11 am on 11 November, in memory of those who died or suffered in all wars and armed conflicts.

I wonder what we will be remembering?

I accepted an offer for mum’s house on Thursday and all my words have vanished again.

When I was trying to decide whether or not to accept the offer, I rang my daughter to see what she thought. Together we decided to sell the house. We two alone, where once it had been we three together.

The circle is broken. I have lost my words.

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In one of life’s lucky coincidences Chris Jordan is giving a lecture in Hobart on Tuesday evening. The lecture is titled “Wasting Away” and he will be talking about the massive waste generated by our throw away society as well as showing the photographs of the albatrosses. For anyone interested out there the lecture is 5.45 – 7 pm at the Stanley Burbury theatre at the uni campus in Sandy Bay.

God is now following me on twitter. Great. Thanks to the evil Sister Paschal and her cane of doom, it has taken me years to shake the spooky sensation that God is watching me and there he is on bloody twitter.Stalking me just like the bloody nun’s said he would. Gah.

The invitations for the exhibition have been printed and I will be posting them off this week. That is my plate in the bottom left hand corner.

I will be back later when I have found my words again.

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Chris Jordan’s albatross photographs. I sent an email off to him asking for permission to reproduce one of his images here but I haven’t received a reply so if you click on his name you will go straight to the images of the dead albatross chicks.

I  planned to take photos of all the steps involved in making the bowl. Once I started to work I got so caught up with the making that I kept on forgetting to take the shots. I would glance up in the middle of adding something to the bowl and see the camera and think,”shit I forgot the photos” and quickly snap away.

I rolled out some clay. It is exactly the same as rolling out pastry except if you nibble bits of the edges it tastes like mud.

I rolled out another thin sheet of clay and then cut out an albatross shaped piece of clay.

I then started to paint the albatross with black and white slip. Slip is liquid clay. You can buy slip from the clay shop. I make my own slip from white clay and add body stains to make all the colours except black. To make black slip I make up a black oxide mix which is 3% black iron oxide, 2% manganese,2% cobalt oxide and 2% nickel oxide. I then add a couple of teaspoons of this mix to half a cup or so of slip. It should fire to a lovely dark charcoal colour (fingers crossed).

I then pressed shapes into the belly of the albatross for texture and to highlight the foreign nature of the plastic.

I decorated the shapes with commercial underglaze colour as well as coloured slip.

I now carefully picked it up and  plonked it on top of a hump mould and hoped like hell that it wouldn’t rip too much, as the clay was really thin.

Now I needed to add another layer of clay to make the pot a bit thicker. So I rolled out some more clay, painted it with some slip so that it would stick and then added it to the bowl. I squashed the new layer of clay down with a rolling pin and then smacked it with a piece of driftwood planking until I was happy with the shape and the texture.

I then painted this layer with black slip.

I still had the pieces of clay leftover from when I had cut out the albatross shape. So I painted them with a slip I had made from local clay gathered from the side of the road, it fires to orange. So I stuck them onto the bowl as well.

I covered them with clingwrap so that they wouldn’t dry out any more and then I squished it all together with the rolling pin.

Once I was happy that everything was all squished together. I took off the clingwrap and gave it a bit of a bash with the driftwood paddle.

I left it on the mould until it had dried out to not quite leather hard. I am an impatient potter and all the time I had been making the bowl, I didn’t have a clue how the albatross inside the bowl had fared.I didn’t know if it had ripped or distorted and I was itching to find out. So as soon as the bowl could be flipped off the mould and still retain a bowl like shape, I turned it over.

And here is the dead albatross.

It took me all morning to make one bowl and the whole process from start to finish was very satisfying. I don’t feel quite so helpless in the face of the enormity of the tragedy of the albatrosses. I have since made another albatoss bowl and I am hoping like mad that I will be happy enough with them to put them in the exhibition.

* edited:- You can see photos of the fired bowl here.

I find commenting on a new blog I have found quite difficult. Sometimes I will just blurt out some nonsense then quickly click publish and scurry away. Sometimes I write a comment and then second guess myself, so I press delete and scurry away.

More often than not though, I just lurk. If a blog post has zillions of comments, well, more than fifty anyway. I get comment envy. I look at all the comments above mine and I just know that I have nothing to say that could possibly compare to those glittering comments that drip with sparkling wit.Those glorious comments that just ooze with insightful compassion give me a hefty dose of commenter’s block and I use the backspace button with gay abandon.

Today I commented on a new blog I had found whilst I was lurking on The Bloggess.I left a silly comment and then ran away.

Which in turn started me thinking about first impressions. I tried to look at my blog with a critical eye and I wondered what a first time visitor would think about my blog? I wondered whether my blog is comment friendly? I know that I have a lovely crew of  regular readers that don’t comment. What stops you from commenting? Are your reasons the same as mine?

Anyway, enough of this blather. I took some photos this week and I would like to share them with you.

I have this photo of Mum and Amy as my screensaver.

I look at this photo every day but I cant bring myself to really have a proper look. If I look properly at this photo and look into my Mother’s eyes I feel myself begin to get all teary. So I quickly look away or I focus on my grand daughter’s face instead.

The enormity of the hole that Mum has left in our lives is only just now starting to become apparent.

Thankfully I have stopped crying every time I think of Mum,though I am crying a little bit as I write this because trying to articulate the depth of my loss makes me examine it in more detail than I want to.

Veronica now has two horses and she reminds me so much of Mum, in that she never does things by halves. Mum was an accomplished and knowledgeable horsewoman and watching my daughter with her two horses I am confident that it wont be long before Veronica is the same.

I don’t know where I am going with this post at all. I only know that today the sky is blue and it promises to be a lovely day and for that I am thankful.

David has been formally diagnosed by the geneticist as having Classical EDS with a score of 7 on the Beighton scale. ( a non bendy person might score a 1 if they could touch the floor with the flat of their hands) I am not very flexible at all so my score would be a zero.

The cardiologist has decided that a non-interventionist approach is best for David. Yay. I am all for non intervention. We go back to see the cardiologist in late January 2010. The  irregularities with Dave’s heart mean that he will have to take extra care of himself and always be aware of the “heart healthy options” which is a big call for a fifteen year old boy who, like his peers thinks that he is ten foot tall and bullet proof.

My mouth is all healed up as is my self esteem. I can wear my teeth all day now without any major discomfort. I have plonked my teeth into the same category that shoes and bras belong, annoyances that must be worn outside the home for the sake of vanity. The first thing I do when I walk in the door when I get home is kick off my shoes, take off my bra and rip out my falsies. aaah.

I have been in touch with the trustees of a local nature reserve and they were quite excited about my idea of a sculpture trail. I was so nervous before I rang them,that I had to wander around the house psyching myself up to make the call. All the angst was for nothing and I was incredibly relieved and excited by the end of the phone call. I am meeting up with the trustees early next February on site. All I need to do is submit a written proposal to the committee and once that is approved I can begin working towards a major interactive exhibition in a lovely bush setting in February 2011. YAY.

I am also excited about our upcoming exhibition Perspectives of  Fire and as soon as the invitations have been printed I will publish one here and then invite you all to the show.

I am working on some different bowls at the moment and Chris Jordan’s photos of the dead albatross chicks have really touched me. I am going to make a dead albatross bowl later on today and I will publish photos of it as a work in progress early next week.

Here are some bowls I made last week. These bowls are the sort of thing that I am thinking of making for the outdoor exhibition. If you mouse over the photos you can read the descriptions of what I have done.

I am off outside now to enjoy the sunshine.

I was reading this article this morning.

The photos will make you stop what you are doing and have a really good think about where the plastic that we throw away ends up.

I followed the links in the article and ended up here.

Midway.

The clip is only 42 seconds long. Please watch it.

And once they have escaped, I have nearly always lost them for good. A sentence or an idea will pop into my head and I will examine its beauty, entranced by the possibilities and then the words will vanish.

I am left silent and wishful. Nurturing a small regret that I hadn’t written them down, trapped them on paper or contained them here so that I could revisit them at my leisure and ponder what they meant.