New Clay Piece – Pantograph enlargement
I’ve not had a chance to blog recently as I’ve been working long hours on my new piece and have been totally absorbed. It is going really well.
Using the pantograph was great, but it does have its limitations and is not that accurate at times. At one point I thought that either my maquette had moved, or the clay was subsidding, but it turned out that the needle on different settings won’t always point to the same point – especially when fully extended as the weight of it bends it.
A few people have said interesting things to me that I’ve been thinking about:
I had a chat with Nigel Boonham at the Yves Dana private view on saturday – He asked me how I was keeping the freshness of the original. At the time I didn’t think this was a problem as I’d been working quite loosely with the clay, quickly sketching the forms.
But as I am working back in on the piece to refine it, I’m finding this is a big problem. The movement and vitality of the initial form has a tendency to get lost. But I can’t just leave it as is, as it has a few ackwardnesses and really could benefit from being pushed further.
I also showed it to a few of the people who come to the life class on tuesday evenings that Roberta runs. In particular Julia Knight the american sculptor I’ve become friends with. She asked me how the piece had changed for me as it was being enlarged.
I started to tell her how I felt I’d been learning about these amazing, strange and subtle forms that were in the molten wax. I was a bit put out as she didn’t seem that interested in that instead saying – “ah, so it is still just forms at the moment”.
However since, I’ve realised that it has to be more than the sum of its parts and perhaps I was shying away from the whole piece’s meaning as it is a bit daunting. Now that I have the model down from its perch under the pantograph, and can look at it, and my developing clay together, I am thinking more of the whole piece and what I have there.
I had also been thinking earlier in the week about what it is and what I am trying to say with it. I don’t really understand the piece, it isn’t how I normally work, but it intrigues me and I am loving the process. I can’t help thinking these are good signs.
I remembered reading about some artists who equate their practice with being a shamen – that you are tuning in to something greater than yourself to bring out a universal truth. In many ways my bird like apparition is similar to ritualistic artifacts from past civilisations – african masks, south american gods… but I think it also has elements of the things that have been concerning me lately: the untameable powers of nature, and yet its fragility in the face of man’s abuse (in the context of climate change and the many ecological disasters we inflict on this poor planet) Perhaps the vulture like qualities of the bird is a representation of death and chaos that could ensue if we get run-away global temperature rises, our 6 degrees of global warming.
It seems weird that I have brought out all my concerns in a very intuitive piece, when I normally work in a very conceptual intellectual way. I somehow worry that I am reading in to an accident things that aren’t there, but when I look at the presence and power of the piece I don’t think this is the case.
In some ways I also feel like I do with most of my best pieces, that I seem to have accidently found it, not that I had all that great a part in creating it.
Ok – better stop now, I hadn’t intended to write so much as I want to get back in to the studio to continue, but in the quiet of the apartment with sleeping mother and son I can think more clearly than at the end of the day, after my son’s asleep, when I’m exhausted and just want to hit my bed myself.
