I have been intrigued by Trudy Roe's suggestion that I make books out of clay. The whole story of claybooks seems quite an exciting road and so I did some finding out...
Take a look at Mark Power's blogg on http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=265101956588893855&pli=1
He has some images of books well worth a look, but particularly he talks about the japanese ceramicist Nishimura Yohei, who dunks books into clay slip and then fires them and obtains veritable flowers of literature! Also check out Victor Schreger, who has a wonderful eye for composing absgtract landscapes with books...
The collection in the V&A is splendid and worth a look as well.
Saturday, 2 October 2010
Friday, 17 September 2010
Henry Fanshawe School
Right down to the wire, as I try to pack for the holyday and at the same time resolve the artis list for the 2011 Holymoorside DARTS Festival. Georgia Peskett and Trudy Roe have signed up so far, so there is three of us and five to go - or 6, depending on their size!
But today, in Dronfield there is the Henry Fanshawe School exhibition, which has a couple of pieces of mine and so have to help set up and man if I can!
Off I go, hoping to come back with photo.
Have worked on boats and books lately: two books and one aircraft carrier to the good this week, cant be bad!
Right down to the wire, as I try to pack for the holyday and at the same time resolve the artis list for the 2011 Holymoorside DARTS Festival. Georgia Peskett and Trudy Roe have signed up so far, so there is three of us and five to go - or 6, depending on their size!
But today, in Dronfield there is the Henry Fanshawe School exhibition, which has a couple of pieces of mine and so have to help set up and man if I can!
Off I go, hoping to come back with photo.
Have worked on boats and books lately: two books and one aircraft carrier to the good this week, cant be bad!
Friday, 10 September 2010
Beauty
"Whatever is in any way beautiful hath its source of beauty in itself, and is complete in itself; praise forms no part of it. So it is none the worse nor the better for being praised." (Marcus Aurelius)
I am struggling with the new project of making books out of clay. Books are what I use for information, for comfort, for refuge and for guidance. Books surround me in every room in my house: stacked, ranged, they wait and offer.
What will a clay book offer, what will it wait for? Art books are objects of enigmatic content. Instead of offering more or less literate, more or less informative, more or less obscure information, they offer the opportunity of receiving from the observer, the reader, the user, whatever content they wish to impose on it.
They are humble and yet arrogant, these clay books. They querry your innermost doubts and confront your weaknesses; they offer a possibility for confression or for boast. They are, above all, containers of thought and feeling.
They are in my hands, in teh process of becoming - and they at present challenge me to give them form.
I suppose I have always wanted to write a book, but felt I had neither the talent nor the content worthy of the enterprise. But now I know I can write this kind of book. In fact, I have so much to say I need to keep the whole thing on a tight rein.
So let me go to it and enough of the writing with words.
I am struggling with the new project of making books out of clay. Books are what I use for information, for comfort, for refuge and for guidance. Books surround me in every room in my house: stacked, ranged, they wait and offer.
What will a clay book offer, what will it wait for? Art books are objects of enigmatic content. Instead of offering more or less literate, more or less informative, more or less obscure information, they offer the opportunity of receiving from the observer, the reader, the user, whatever content they wish to impose on it.
They are humble and yet arrogant, these clay books. They querry your innermost doubts and confront your weaknesses; they offer a possibility for confression or for boast. They are, above all, containers of thought and feeling.
They are in my hands, in teh process of becoming - and they at present challenge me to give them form.
I suppose I have always wanted to write a book, but felt I had neither the talent nor the content worthy of the enterprise. But now I know I can write this kind of book. In fact, I have so much to say I need to keep the whole thing on a tight rein.
So let me go to it and enough of the writing with words.
Saturday, 21 November 2009
The Chesterfield Arts Centre
The first single step in this journey of a thousand miles seems to be taken: the CAAF group are meeting with the Feasibility Study consultant. They are showing him the results of a social consultation that happened last month at Chesterfield Market Festival. We have our photo with the Lord Mayor!
We also have absolutely wonderful support from the public, as seen in their comments, made with humour, earnest interest, hopefulness and encouragement.
We feel that the many hours of dawn meetings at Shirley's house, were well worth the trouble. See here:
And of course Shirley's fire-red locks were captured in the course of the day for all to admire:
With Half term raging, parents and children took to the bustling market lanes of the town centre and some brave souls took their crayons and paper and created images of the old buildings, their vision of the old town, of what they know and love, and of what they would like to see.
There were prizes and there were good laughs! But above all, there was consensus: WE WANT AN ARTS CENTRE FOR CHESTERFIELD. Marvellous!
Saturday, 14 November 2009
Beauty and Ugliness
In making these pot women, I stray into the notion of joining the clay and bringing to life the feelings of people I have met only in abstraction. How can I do that?! It seems too arrogant and presumptuous. And of course it is.What I do, in fact, is give form to part of me that I feel the need to negotiate with. I need to bring out the abandoned person, fashion its likeness, sustain its collapsing tendency, allow it to retain precariousness and flaw: just make it all bearable before it can be fired and fixed satisfactorily. So, no, this is not a strangely vulnerable, barely human form. This is not an emigrant with a small baby having to roam and desintegrate in a careless and violent society. This is who it is: a shard of me.
A lump of clay is, unlike the bright white page, a thing without dignity, packaged in a red or buff plastic bag. It is not hard to gouge lumps out of it, to knead it, to compress it, to attack it with fury or to coax it softly into shape. The only sentiment it will not brook is disregard and negligence. If left, it will become resentfully brittle or it will slump discouraged. So, staying together, the form evolves with thought and becomes.
Nevertheless, the risks are immense. All that time, all that planning, all that sketching, all those materials for what? One has to be prepared to end up with a piece that has all the ugliness of one's fears, all the split badness of schyzoid dread and no resolution of integrated beauty; it is not for me shameful that the clay refuses to obbey my command, nor that I fail to pursue it until it does. The shame is that I fail to press myself beyond the ordinary level of awareness and discover that scary cavern within and there delve for acceptance of my ugly self and my beautiful self. When Beauty falls in love with the Beast, there is success, there is glory.
The artist "who needs to control [the work] completely will produce an over-refined, stifled and lifeless work that has been allowed no independent intrinsic vitality and life of its own." Instead, I should learn to "develop a genuine and sensitive dialogue witht he artwork as an independent object." - so says S.J. Newton in Painting, Psychoanalysis and Spirituality.
Furthermore, says he, the art work should expose the entire creative process in its dynamic, it should have the mark of the hand that dealt with it, should have traces of incompletion, so that the further dialogue of the piece with the viewer can continue. The artist leaves the door open for others to share in and relate to the work.
No, I genuinely do not worry about my incompetence as a potter. That is, like the common cold, an inevitable nuisance not to be avoided but to be cured in time. I worry about resisting ugliness and dictating what beauty looks like; I worry that I will not be able to remember that it is a symbol I want to produce and not a statement.
I write this because I want to remember. Mostly, in the light of day, out there in the dialogue with each significant other, I forget so easily this quiet flame that burns while I work but flickers when I don't. The question I ask myself is, where lies my road in life? Is it in the clay? Is it in the counselling? Is it with the nurturing family? Am I trying to do too much? Am I living too much inside my own head?
Yes, Bernard, why am I so serious? Because my life is very serious business to me: I remember very well feeling as a child that nobody else seemed to think so! So I've always been this way...
Saturday, 24 October 2009
The Return and Rebirth of Madame Seuss
She is an old friend. She has meaning rooted deep in my soul and it is a great pity that upon her latest firing she met with a great obstacle to fulfilling her potential: her feet distorted and she can no longer stand. She has lingered prone on the sidelines, a hopeless image of restless abandon. Things have now changed, at least in theory...Propped up, she awaits eagerly developments to come. Action is afoot and planning is hotting up, thanks to Hanne Westergaard, a much admired potter in Sheffield who knows a thing or two about moulds...
Cheerfulness is a triumphant bonus to life. It lifts the clouds and lets in the vitamin of hopefulness. Even if dashed later, the moment has been saved in a frame of golden optimism and can be glanced, in passing and savoured.
I am cheerful and hopeful about moulds. I shall work on remaking Mme. Seuss with feet square on a plynth. How magnificent she will be, poised in inscrutable superiority atop a stony outcrop, a grassy knoll or even a soap box.
I met Mme Seuss for the first time through a relative of hers, a warrior of great spirit, striding through the streets of a devastated city under enemy bombardment, in one of Edward's ellustrated drawn strips. This heroic general, a leader of men, is nothing to me but had to have a profoundly influential relative, a female, whose wisdom and fortitude gave him his swagger and self-confidence. I found her emerging from a billowing porcelain dream.
Having lost her footing in the infernal heat of vitrification, Mme. Seuss is about to become once again the towering figure whe was meant to be from creation. She will emerge, re-cast but unbowed and will once again dominate the landscape of significant women, augmented by new technique and reinvigorated by new adornment. Good news, eh!?
Monday, 17 August 2009
Lighten up Already!
"In
the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river, it was always hungry. In that land of beginnings, spirits mingled with the unborn." (Ben Okri, The Famished Road)
Freedom, I think, extends in all directions. I look beyond the incredible and the unknown, and there it is. Through barriers and prohibitions, taboos and dangerous frontiers. It is a wild and dangerous space out there. I imagine exhilaration and baulk. I suffer for it. I stake my fiercest claim to the walls of prisons in the mind.
What is the difference between me, you and the circumstance? Can I see it? I hear what I want to hear; I see what I want to see. Irrespective. Feels hot just to think of it.
It is hard to have the courage of the open sky, to let go of the other and of the circumstance and set sail down that river - not on your own, but on your own merit. Without borrowed clothes: my husband the big cheese and my daughter the big hope; my son the big doer and my son the big thinker. All of them, all of us, deep feelers. Not a criminal among us! What makes it so? The prison walls of the mind?
The hungry river is the only gateway.
"Phlebas, the Phoenicioan, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you."
(T.S.Elliott, Death by Water)
Or again, as TSE would say, "These fragments I have shored up against my ruin": it is like sweeping autumn leaves in the high winds; it is like sifting out the chaff; it is like paring down and minimalising: you are always aware that any moment now, it all has ultimately to end up in the bin.
Lightening up the load is a beginning. First, I want to throw away fake memories. The first to go whould be the ones that simply prove that I have existed for so many years; the next will be the bits and pieces that prove that someone noticed I was there; after that, I will throw away the clothes that no longer fit; then go the things I dislike; by then I should be able to discern what I like but don't need. And so it should go, throwing out the garbage thread by thread, crumb by crumb, tears, smiles and all... until all that is left is me = small, unimpressive and bare. But real.
See the curls around the forehead and the pouty lips? See the strong eyebrows and the upturned chin? See the puffy cheeks and the scored temples? Who would ever do anything for me without expecting payment? Who would ever chase me for an autograph? Who would ever sacrifice a chicken to my image?
the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once a river, it was always hungry. In that land of beginnings, spirits mingled with the unborn." (Ben Okri, The Famished Road)Freedom, I think, extends in all directions. I look beyond the incredible and the unknown, and there it is. Through barriers and prohibitions, taboos and dangerous frontiers. It is a wild and dangerous space out there. I imagine exhilaration and baulk. I suffer for it. I stake my fiercest claim to the walls of prisons in the mind.
What is the difference between me, you and the circumstance? Can I see it? I hear what I want to hear; I see what I want to see. Irrespective. Feels hot just to think of it.
It is hard to have the courage of the open sky, to let go of the other and of the circumstance and set sail down that river - not on your own, but on your own merit. Without borrowed clothes: my husband the big cheese and my daughter the big hope; my son the big doer and my son the big thinker. All of them, all of us, deep feelers. Not a criminal among us! What makes it so? The prison walls of the mind?
The hungry river is the only gateway.
"Phlebas, the Phoenicioan, a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you."
(T.S.Elliott, Death by Water)
Or again, as TSE would say, "These fragments I have shored up against my ruin": it is like sweeping autumn leaves in the high winds; it is like sifting out the chaff; it is like paring down and minimalising: you are always aware that any moment now, it all has ultimately to end up in the bin.
Lightening up the load is a beginning. First, I want to throw away fake memories. The first to go whould be the ones that simply prove that I have existed for so many years; the next will be the bits and pieces that prove that someone noticed I was there; after that, I will throw away the clothes that no longer fit; then go the things I dislike; by then I should be able to discern what I like but don't need. And so it should go, throwing out the garbage thread by thread, crumb by crumb, tears, smiles and all... until all that is left is me = small, unimpressive and bare. But real.
See the curls around the forehead and the pouty lips? See the strong eyebrows and the upturned chin? See the puffy cheeks and the scored temples? Who would ever do anything for me without expecting payment? Who would ever chase me for an autograph? Who would ever sacrifice a chicken to my image?
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