This pot, together with its twin, took me from November to mid June to finish. I did a few other things in between, but I worked hard and thought hard, took some chances and not all of them resulted very well: I like the learning that comes from mistakes, like the chance to test and accept the risks. It is disappointing that I, impulsively, fired it without checking that all glaze had been wiped off the bottom. Even I should know better than to do that! The result is that a good part of the bottom of the pot stayed stuck to the shelf, which ruined the pot and the shelf.
It is ok to know why things went wrong but, surprisingly, it is the loss of colour that bugs me most, because I can't imagine what happened there - 4% red iron oxide slip should produce at least a minimal blush or jaundice and there is no sign of that except for the very faint smudges here and there. So I went from finding the pot too garish to finding it pale and stale. Oh yes, and make that lovely glaze a bit thicker next time! Start again
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Out for a walk over a landscape so odd and uncompromising makes me look at the small details. I want to know what makes this place so different, so scary and so gripping. It is not pandering to any aesthetic arrangement that I can recognise. Boulders tumbling over and under tree roots. Trees riveted in a crucifixion of stone. It is painful to touch those trunks so contorted, so profoundly callused. The stones themselves are covered in soft velvety moss, but they have been rounded and polished not just by rolling and tumbling but by millennia of rain and wind and wild rushing streams in spate. This place is OLD. I look at nature to see forms I can take home to my mud; I look for bellies and handles and voids and pattern and repetition. Everywhere that has been gardened and pampered offers some of this. it is eminently comforting to see forms you recognise or adopt for your own in nature. There was none of this in this place. It gives nothing, yields nothing. It teaches without words the beauty of real. The elegance of being. The stillness of true. These are vast lessons that take a time to sink in and produce a new quiet humble reality. The imperfect, the possible, the quiet, the unpolished. Go there and see; stand amidst those boulders and experience, listen, be. So, on my walk, looking at the small details, I missed the point entirely. I took photographs and made audio notes into my phone. I was dissatisfied and uncomfortable on a cold morning, feet hurting from the irregular terrain. My jaw was set and I wound up with a buzzy head. It was such hard work resisting the pull of the place while clinging desperately to a preformed intention of making the landscape mine. That is what gave me a headache. It just shows, you have to be armed with imagination when you confront the outdoors: you never know what might happen next! |
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