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.

Halloween

My friends and me at Halloween party at Royal College of Art. It's Royal Albert Hall in the background.

First project at the Royal College of Art

THE V&A PROJECT:

Make a tea cup!

Do I look like someone who does tea cups!?

Or plates? Or tea pots? (Well, I once did a tea pot. It worked well as a sprinkler for a football pitch! Now it's in someone’s garden retiring as a flowerpot.)

But nonetheless that was the assignment; well it might not have been put so strictly. We were required in our work to have a reference to some kind of classic vessel and then we should choose an inspirational object at the V&A museum from which we should pick up some technical details that we wanted to focus on and then translate them into our work.



Working on my first project, the park in the background is Hyde Park. The first week in college, we went to the V&A museum to find this inspirational object. But I must say; in this museum there are quite a few things to choose from! And I hate decisions, imaging that picture. I did like everything equestrian (long love for horses) and there was plenty of them depicted in various ways; done as figurines, depicted on plates and bigger sculptures etc. But as one of my tutors correctly pointed out, maybe a horse was a fairly large animal for such a short project. Especially because the project mainly was to get us used to work in the studio and become familiar with the workshops. Not to mention the difficulties it could cause trying to make a horse into a cup.
 

 

I spent the two first weeks trying to find my way around doing a cup - until I finally confronted myself with what this was about? Why was I reacting so strongly to this? Could it have something to do with being insecure about my identity as an artist? I had to ask myself if it really was going to ruin my carrier doing a cup. The answer was, probably not. If it went wrong, I could just keep quiet and not tell anyone (apart from you of course). In this time I guess I was sent back to the museum 3 times before I suddenly saw something I could use. And there it was: The Kiss. And from that moment on, I just knew that I had found and embraced my own inner tea cup.

The kiss was the Greek goddess Psyke kissing another mythological figure. It has always been intriguing to me how you can get away with showing quite provocative or controversial things as long as it is disguised in an aesthetic subtlety. I did slip cast the cup for practical reasons. Choosing parian porcelain, to match the surface of the classical marble sculpture.

Parian is a kind of odd clay, it's a type of porcelain, but more translucent and it's self-glazing with a smooth surface and silky shine. In the past it was used for white marble imitation. 

You win some and you loose some :-) The inexperienced caster is lacking patience. For those of you not so familiar with slip casting: It is not supposed to look like this, it's supposed to release the mould in one piece nice and easily. 

Douglas White: New Skin for an old Cermony



Installing the work in the gallery, Paradise Row Gallery, London

Read more about the exhibition and see photos of the finished work here (will open in a new window) 

My friend and I, private view, Douglas White's New Skin for an old Cermony, Paradise Row, London



Having fun with clay in London while trying to find a flat

Moving to London for minimum two years - the next images, I'm going to show you somehow seem to belong to another story. But this amazing studio was actually the first place where I was going to spend all my waking hours. The massive amount of clay wasn't there from the start, only test pieces - but we soon began building.

 

Finding accommodation in London can be an emotional roller coaster, one day you have a house and the next day you don't. We thought we were all sorted out, but the day before, I had arranged to come help Douglas with his clay, our house felt through. So arriving in London hardly knowing anything about the life I was about to begin, was a floating feeling. But as always, things work out, and after a few days we had a nice flat on hands.

 

As said, these pictures are from my first weeks in London. I guess, I'm the photographer since not on them and I almost think that Douglas and Harry was called in to pose for the photographer on the picture below.

Big sculptures make a lot of mess. And the beauty of big studios is that they can contain unbelievable volumes of messiness before it's necessary to tidy up. If you're only to do one thing right in your life: make sure it will be to have a wet and dry hoover by your side, he will be the one to save you from despair!

Below you can see what became some of the later/final test/study pieces. Some of it was also used in the final exhibition, but they could be called rehearsal before building what became the final installation on-site in the gallery, which you can read more about here: here

Sarcasm used: I'm of course very concerned about health and safety issues in relation to working with clay.

One of the last days in Denmark and at ARoS

Studio 70D, Aarhus, Denmark

kingBIRD: Butterfly Valley

This project is inpired by the poem 'Butterfly Valley – a requiem' written by the Danish poet Inger Christensen.

A requiem is a death mass. Although death is the central scene in “Butterfly Valley” the poem is also a tribute to our fragile lives.

Form: The poems are written in the form of a classic, rhymed sonnet where rigid composition and repetition are the keystones. The form is ancient and very rigid, but it's the strength of the poem that the lines are repeated and translated into a new context and therefore changing significance. The constant recurrence patterns, shifting meanings and strict use of repetitions can be seen as process searching for cognition. In the classic sonnet there is an expectation that the text contains both an observation and a perception of something and an interpretation or an epistemological conclusion of those.

What is happening in the poem: The poem opens up with a spectacular sight of butterflies fluttering up in the midday heat in a valley in south Europe – exuding colour and warmth. For the narrator the flying butterflies awake glimpses of childhood memories, and thus begins the unfolding of the central topics of the poem; memory, nature, love, life and death. The narrative self is mirrored in nature and realizing herself as being enrolled as a part of it.

Death: The awareness of death is becoming more progressive throughout the poem. In the last sonnet the narrative self both reconciles herself with everything being finite, but also that the world still contains many moments of happiness.

kingBIRD, Butterfly Valley, 2009, ceramic

Why this inspires me: Describing a poem’s form and knowledge of butterflies is quite concrete observations and interpretations that can bring you some way into the understanding of the poem, but here the poem starts to bristle against. If these concrete descriptions are to make any sense the reader must go a step further and surrender the mind and just go into the maze of the poem. The sonnets are playing around, changing from concrete descriptions to liquid pictures and the sensory impressions change from the near to the outreach of cosmos. The contrast between the poem’s rigid composition and the feeling of the transient fluttering butterflies is elegant.

The built-in repetitions of the Sonnet Crown (Lines put into new contexts) are forcing the reader constantly to correct his or hers understanding of the poem. A reader trying to organize the poetry universe in a linear or hierarchical structure fails, because the universe is born labyrinthine. Nor is it possible to analyze the sonnet individually in order to assemble the partial analysis into an overall interpretation. The contrast between the tight composition of the poem and the feeling of the transient fluttering butterflies ensures that you must go along with the playful nature of the sonnet if you want an answer to your questions.

Gold Tounge



kingBIRD, Gold Tounge, 2009, ceramic.

Firing Sculpture, Aarhus Academy of Fine Art, Denmark

It's been several years since this sculpture was build, however the memory of it still stands out very clear in my memory. It was an extraordinary experience of what clay is capable of as a material if you treat it right. It also taught me not to worry to much or be scared of the material - it's only clay. Just try out different things, actually the worst thing you can do working with clay is to put out taking the crusial decisions.

The sculpture before the kiln was build around it. It's me in the front of the picture. We only had five days to build, dry and fire the sculpture which is, if you think about it, far from realistic planning. And on top of that it was raining most of the time, so drying out the sculpture before firing it wasn't really happening. But we managed anyway, only with at tiny bit of damage to the sculpture.

Fring the sculpture (I'm sitting in the pile of wood). The sculpture is wrapped in ceramic felt which works as a kiln. We used around 5 tons of clay and 12 m3 of wood to fire it.

The sculpture revealed glowing in the night. When the sculpture are on top temperature it is unwrapped, imaging the heat radiating from 5 tons of clay fired to 1100 ° C. It glows for a surprisingly short time, before it turns dark, it is a bit like firework.

Despite the size, these firing sculptures are very fragile due to the harsh treatment they are exposed to in the firing and therefore often don't last long. Normally winter and frost erodes them.  

 

The following day: