My rotating studio desk

Some sketches of miniature duve and pillow and other stuff on my desk in the studio. 

Royal College of Art and the Royal Albert Hall by night

I saw this amazing and stunning photo of Royal Albert Hall on dailymails website the other day. But what I especially like is that the building in the right lower corner is the Royal College of Art. And the second rows of windows from the bottom is the ceramic department.

Motion Capture

Rose and I participating in an experiment with motion capture- hence the most flattering suits we are wearing.

kingBIRD: My heart feels soft

Love and sorrows come in equal parts

The images below show the an in-situ performance modelling at the exhibition: “LOOK LESS, FEEL MORE – creating the exhibition as we go, doing is the show”, Hockney Gallery, London, January 2012.

I always have a reference to the classical sculpture in the back of my head when working with body related themes. However, I'm mostly interested in making the content somehow present and tell the stories about loss of love and life. I try to capture in these sculptures - what are not there anymore – dealing with longiness after the sweet, safe and secure and a desire to be healed. But longing for restoration is an unsafe and unstable place to be, as it may not happen.

 

"I find it intriguing to play with the border between the private and personal – playing with what should be told and what shouldn’t".

Sublime: If the sublime is seen as the noble, the splendid and the terrifying. I find that art, love and life are exactly that – a suspense between triumph and tragedy.

Concept: I wish to merge the notion of longing for consolation and heeling with the process of making the object and the actual appearance of the object.

In the making, I try to transfer emotions into clay - not only using the hands, but my body to form stroke and caress the clay and build the sculptures in the very intimate sphere of my own body.  This gives the sculpture the heavy and soft feeling of flesh from something living and at the same time it holds the slightly clichéd reminiscence of a heart shape.

In this work, the clay is used as a substitute - filling up the void of which I rather would have reserved for human touch and contact. 

Photo by Yiru Wang

LOOK LESS, FEEL MORE: The House

When we didn't know what to do next, we decided to build ourselves a house. One of our class mates had in an earlier exercise made the most cool little house/building and we used that as a model for this house.  

LOOK LESS, FEEL MORE: Making clay

LOOK LESS, FEEL MORE - YOU, ME, 3 DAYS AND 250 KG OF CLAY

 

There's nothing wrong with half a ton of mud!

The day before our exhibition, we had to prepare the clay we were going to use, so it was just the way we liked it. It's a big task to mix 400 kg of clay, but it's nothing compared to the annoying-ness of wasting time on bad prepared clay.

I'm just too lazy not to do it right the first time ;-)

We thought, we had 250 kg of clay, but we found some more in the back of a shelve; we ended up with 500-ish kg. which was much better! 250 may sound a lot, but it really isn't. Clay is so heavy that even a ton doesn't look like much. I have often ordered big amounts of clay and then when arriving wondered if that was all. We used a nice crank clay. I'm a very tolerant person, but I would never use buff clay for something like this. Although it's cheap, it's messy, unpleasant to work with and it's not worth reclaiming. It would be like serving McDonald's take-away for your dinner guest...cold.

LOOK LESS, FEEL MORE

Rosie and I (and some more) are going to do a clay event in the Hockney Gallery next week. We're going to start to make a 'frame' for it, so it's easy for other people to join in. It's exciting not knowing what's going to happen, but in that way, we have the opportunity to experience something totally unexpected.

The elephant is now in the Collection of Charles Saatchi

A part of an interview with my friend Douglas White (I helped out building this sculpture). The interview is shown on the website of Saatchi Gallery. I'm the ceramicist friend and I must admit it's not unlike me - to feel both terrified and excited at the same time:

DD: What other up and coming projects are you working on?
Douglas White: This project has been utterly immersing. It’s always the same with a new material and new body of work. For the past four months I feel like I have lived and breathed clay and dead elephants and it’s difficult to imagine anything else.
And I haven’t tried firing any of these clay pieces which sounds like an interesting challenge on this scale They would need to be pit-fired which involves digging huge trenches for the works and constructing kiln-like structures around them which are destroyed during process. Then you dig the works out. I mentioned it to my ceramicist friend, I think I saw a look of terror and excitement cross her face, that’s always a good starting point.

The Article from Saatchi Gallery

Read the entire article
Source:dazeddigital.com

Secret Santa

HAPPY CHRISTMAS

I know these aren't the first party pictures I've shown here. Just to make sure - we do work very hard in between going out! ;-) So a few days before the 1st term ended, we had yet another brilliant party: the Christmas party. Everyone had brought a dish from their native country or region and as you see Secret Santa was there too.

Our amazing technical staff at our department (Ceramic and Glass, Royal College of Art, London) made sure that Secret Santa was invited to the Christmas party. It's impossible not to feel at home!

Santa did also have a present for me.



We spend the afternoon decorating the plaster workshop, so it was ready for the festive celebration.

If you are at an art college make sure always to check out the bins.

In them,  we did find some paper waste who made the much 

adorable snow ball ornaments. 

The very first step in the transformation to winter wonderland

Enjoying the fruits of our work. The moustaches was the feature of the night. My moustache is in my forehead - it wouldn't stick while eating :-)

The lip and kissing Tea Cup

This tea cup is made with lips. So in order to drink from it you have to kiss it. It can be very intimate or quite intimidating.



kingBIRD, Lip imprint tea cup, 2011, parian porcelain, slipcasted. The saucer in drapery is taken from the fabric that the women in front have draped around her hips and the imperfect and organic shape of the cup is taken from the soft feeling of the skin of her belly.  

Inpiration piece from the V&A museum.