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.

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.