Reflections: From Fiction to Reality

This piece came about during a phase when I grew a bit tired of throwing; sometimes you just have to get off the wheel and do other stuff. So I began making heads, masks, and experimented with facial expressions - mostly smiling faces. One of which you can see on the side of this blog.

So I made this face - drawing inspiration from the Joker:

and the comedy-tragedy masks:

At first I thought about replicating a line by Ella Wheeler Wilcox from her poem 'Solitude':

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;

    Weep, and you weep alone;

For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,

    But has trouble enough of its own.

Sing, and the hills will answer;

    Sigh, it is lost on the air;

The echoes bound to a joyful sound,

    But shrink from voicing care.

Rejoice, and men will seek you;

    Grieve, and they turn and go;

They want full measure of all your pleasure,

    But they do not need your woe.

Be glad, and your friends are many;

    Be sad, and you lose them all,—

There are none to decline your nectared wine,

    But alone you must drink life’s gall.

Feast, and your halls are crowded;

    Fast, and the world goes by.

Succeed and give, and it helps you live,

    But no man can help you die.

There is room in the halls of pleasure

    For a large and lordly train,

But one by one we must all file on

    Through the narrow aisles of pain.

 It's those first couple lines. I've heard them before but never had the impetus to go look it up until it was referenced in the Korean film, 'Old Boy':

 Like the Counte of Monte Cristo, the main chracter is locked away without knowing his crime. But in this prison-apartment, there is this picture with the first line from Ella Wilcox's poem (in korean, of course:

The painting is by James Ensor entitled, 'Man of Sorrows'.  And one of my first ideas, along with the Joker, was to recreate something like this and use the same line: "Laugh and the whole world laughs with you. Weep, and you weep alone." I liked it but... it was almost a bit too angsty and had a strong existentialist overtone - not that that would be bad or unappealing but it invoked a certain mood from high school and some sculptural work I did then. I wanted to go in a different direction, something that reflected my own thoughts and feelings at the time.

Coincidentally, I watched the anime movie Paprika. Just randomly out of the blue, I thought I'd watch it. If you don't know:



And in this movie, is the line: "From fiction to reality." This was it. I thought it was great as it not only evoked dystopian and utopian imaginations but it also reflected the process of manifesting one's imagination, one's fiction, into a form of reality. From fiction to reality seemed to capture the process of becoming within the creative process. Translating my imagination. It was vague enough to evoke a range of meaning from different perspectives and the smiling face could provide another layer of construction. So I decided to use the phrase and go ahead with making a wall piece.

I was using a clay body called 'Dark Mountain' and had some scraps left over so I used a rolling pin to flatten it out and give it wood-like surface. I scored the bottom and attached the head.
It was my first time using this clay body so I wasn't quite sure how the glazes would turn out. So I decided to go with, what I was doing quite a bit at the time, simply staining the piece with red-iron oxide. Knowing that the clay was rich in iron and adding the stain, also rich in iron, I was told that it would give off a steel-blue-ish, gray-ish color. This was the final product:



When it first came out, I thought it was alright. Some of the things I took away was that while it looked really good laying on the surface of the table, when it hung on the wall the face was tilted a bit too much to the floor. I could have altered it so that it would look a bit more directly at the viewer. I thought th clay body came out really well. The rich brown and the texture was great. Some mixed feelings about the red iron oxide. At any rate, it would be fun to do a series of similar wall pieces and kind of play around with the combinations of face, phrase, font, clay bodies, and different techniques of arrangement. One thing is for sure: just because it looks ok flat on the table, doesn't mean that it will look good on the wall.

At any rate, this was a fun piece, I enjoyed making it.

Phil Rogers

Ken Matsuzaki - Elemental

Reflections: Snot from the fire gods

The previous post reminded me of this piece. I think it was a saggar firing and, at the moment, I can't remember what I even glazed them in... but there are two glazes at work here (the lip of the bowl was dipped in something else, which gives it the aesthetic it has above). It's a pretty big bowl, maybe about 15 inches in diameter. But the reason why I like this piece, and was reminded of it from the previous post, is that the result was very much unexpected - particularly that effect in the middle.

When the piece came out of the firing, the ceramics teacher looked at me and said that I got some "kiln snot." I thought the phrase was amusing: "kiln snot." My bowl was a kleenex and the fire gods decided to blow their nose! Sometimes they bless you with something nice and sometimes they shit on it. It's part of the fun. The uncertainty. The unexpected. We try to control for the effects, adjusting where we place it in the kiln, trying to decrease or increase oxygen flow, manage runny glazes, use wax, control how long we dip the glaze - depending on our understanding of it, use electric or gas kilns, and do the best we can. But there is always the possibility for something weird and fun. I think it's best to embrace the uncertainty and the unknown as we perfect our craft and techniques.

While there is, at least for non-production potters (and this isn't to say that production potters don't put their own stamp on their work but part of their training is to make every piece the same - a mechanization of embodied technique), a deep personalization with the process of creating a piece and when you have something you really like, it makes the glazing process that much more difficult fully knowing that the fire gods may not bless it with the desired outcome. And when the work comes out of the fire, sometimes you love it that much more or learn to detach yourself from it, take a couple lessons for the future, and disgard it. I remember my old ceramics teacher from high school telling me that out of every 10 pieces he throws, he might like 1 or 2. I never understood this until later on and it's one of those things that I've remembered. And indeed, if it weren't for my mother, even as an amateur and hobbyist, I probably would have trashed most of my pieces or recycled them into something else (For the record, I would have kept this piece - never had the fire gods blow their nose before).  

Ceramics of Huancas

                                                                         Gabriella Filgueira

"Like in the old days, the women make pots of different sizes and types and even home adornments, such as candlesticks and incense burners characterized by their porous texture and which follow they styles of manufacture of the ancestors with decoration that all together does not damage the environment. Every step of the process is a small ritual.

...

Just as in life, the law of the survival of the fittest rules in the cusana. The pieces that do not rise to exact and proportional measures of materials break as if by magic. Not even the most advanced industry has such a sophisticated and rigorous rule."


The fire gods of ceramics are a fickle bunch


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Giant Clay Pots and 8,000 year old tradition of Georgia wine

"I don't make anything special," he says. "I only continue in the way started by my parents."
 
Georgia's winemaking heritage goes back 8,000 years and centers on the qvevri, a cavernous terra-cotta pot shaped like an egg, lined with beeswax and buried to the mouth underground. But these ancient vessels were sidelined by the industrial wine production dictated by seven decades of Soviet rule. Over the past 10 years, however, qvevri wine has slowly recovered. Today, it is a calling card for Georgian wine around the world.

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