My friend Mette Maya Gregersen makes waves (in all sorts of ways, but particularly in clay). She passes into a world where the creation of form gives birth to meaning in the world. I think this is how I see her work. She battles the sharp waves of the vast ocean that is life and contains it in ceramic objects that somehow stand up literally but also metaphorically: stand up to the test of time, to the unlikely victory of the weak against the strong and powerful, the static versus the versatile. When I make ships I think of - I compare with - her waves: Do they belong in the same universe?. Actually, my ships are always shipwrecked, sunk, or about to perish at sea. There is never a holiday glide on the flat water. The turmoil is not the message, but the energy that propels meaning. There is a darkness in this work. I never manage to add the resurrection, the healing, the calm after the storm, the dawn of a cleansed world. Everything I do is a container. There is no intention of it actually containing, receiving, some material, be it liquid or solid, but rather these containers are meant to invite your ideas, your reactions, your interpretations. Sometimes, on the contrary, they bear the message, the scars of battle, the anxiety, the fear, the aggression, the dread, the sin, the ambition... and ask you to contain that despair and contemplate that condition. These vessels are born of the daily news. I am thinking at the moment of the tremendous appeal of a likely story. How we need to hear a tale of success, of goodness, of victory against the odds. And we vote for it; we want this great promise to be ours and we give it our backing. And it then turns out to be quite hollow. And we move on to the next story. Look at the men in the news: Jimmy Saville has a new documentary; Boris Johnson continues to skate on thin ice; Vladimir Putin continues to kill innocent people; Xi Jinping continues to build his Empire; Joe Biden is staying alive; Barrack Obama has left the building. Where is the ship that will carry all this to hell?
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What can we be nowadays but melancholy? The news of the war are so dire. And yet they were dire when the Libyans were being decimated chemically and otherwise. But this time we see it sitting to dinner among our goods and chapels, our family, in our own safe shelter, precarious as an egg shell...
I was in Sheffield at the Ceramics Festival this weekend and the joy of seeing my friendly faces was indescribable. Literally, because each person comes with the shortest message of hope in their eyes, the questioning, the eagerness fo enquiry. A few are such regular visitors, our conversation continues from year to year, and it makes me wonder, will it always matter, even after I no longer go and exhibit there? Or they are lost or move away? It will always matter to me, those friendly eyes, those smart insightful comments, those questions and above all the sharing of hope and insight. I don't tell them of feeling lost so often - (you know who you are! my secret is out... lol). I long to stop this pilgrimage of ideas. I long to find the central core of my search and stand firm and do what I really mean t do. First, I need to continue work on ships. I need not actually work on anything else because ships can stand for all sorts of life stories that shake me and always have done. This time I need to make the Covid ship, while I wait for the Ukraine ship to arrive in my cognitive brain. Covid did not arrive in a junk with ribbed sails or domed shelter. And yet, it did come from Wuhan... I'll give this some thought. |
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