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

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.