Thursday, January 8, 2009

USE THE TALENTS YOU POSSESS, FOR THE WOODS WOULD BE A QUIETER PLACE IF NO BIRDS SANG, EXCEPT FOR THE BEST Henry Van Dyke

5 January 09 What a nice start to the year, my friend Andrea Vinkovic, omnicapable Editor of PYRE (the newsletter of the Ceramic Arts Association of Western Australia CAAWA) asked me to be the Potter in Profile for the February edition. http://www.ceramicartswa.asn.au/ Proof it pays to party! She hit me with a list of questions drawing forth secrets about myself re. Gin and ladies of the night in Dublin. Crikey! What would I reveal under interrogation? Andrea presses me to 'write' as it comes easy to me, (not to claim I am any good at it), which is partly why this blog was born, sharing writing about ceramics, two of my loves. See Andrea's beautiful clay work on http://www.andrea-ceramics.com/ Funny though, in describing my current work for the PYRE interview I had insights about what else I could have done, and may encompass in the next phase of that series of work. Yes, a penny has dropped, working in a series makes a lot of sense, even to eclectic me. I popped in snaps of work for my ANU Image and Text on Clay project, which had just gone into the kiln. Two green 'boxes' with laser decals of birds, prior to firing the text and lines look black, as they are just out of a laser printer, but fired, they turn dark reddish brown or Sepia which can be a very nostalgic look. These boxes were duds, ie. the glaze did not apply well, I blush to admit, the colour is dull and the box walls - stoneware paper clay warped having dried in the ambient 37 degree C heat of this West Australian Summer. I'm so glad I held off with the hammer though, I like them a lot more now.

Another friend, Janice, visited for tea and, on hearing what I'd been making, assumed I'd used the interior spaces of the box forms and not the exterior ones. Janice paints and like me, says what she thinks, but her Scottish accent makes it sound kind - I put a lot of store in her views. Once she saw a huge old paper plaster mould of a dome in my studio and rhapsodised about it's form and texture - I saw it with new eyes after that.

Interior space, box, bird box .... endless possibilities.

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