porcelain
I have not written about the pots for a while. I have a new project, making porcelain pieces for Mina Perhonen in Japan, which are more production pieces, even though they are still made by hand, but things have been slow, with many interruptions.
the order consists of bottles, conical bowls, and spoons. it has taken a few weeks to get anywhere near filling the kiln, but there are enough pieces to start packing it now.
I have experimented with many different textures, made by impressing leaves, ivy flower heads, and various implements into the porcelain.
the spoons are very delicate; a mouse broke one by treading on it – a fat mouse presumably. I can’t get rid of them in the workshop.
I have also made some more jars with cut-off lids, using the impress/stamping technique to almost pierce the clay, or pushing knife or brush handles through it.
as the porcelain is translucent, this should allow the light into/out of these, and they might be pretty with tea-lights in them.
the last set of pieces were these six bottles, made in Southern Ice porcelain. it seems to split open even more than the Audrey Blackman, I was surprised to find most of these with top to bottom splits in them, although I had made deep grooves in them by impressing apple leaves into them, which have big central stems, and will have encouraged the clay to open.
the oak leaf and rose hip arrangement is one of the decorations I made for our feast; taken out of the hedgerow in Sharrington Road, the oaks are for us sea-going types (Hearts of Oak) and for the Bale oak ….
I will try some more saggar firing with some of these, but the pieces for Japan will be glazed. there will be some more split firings, I think.
amsterdam three – shopping
day four in Amsterdam. a trip to the Nordmarket flea market with mina perhonen. shopping and walking, hopping on and off the bus that runs up and down the Princes Graft, the first of the old canals near Tamago.
we found buttons, very useful, I got a bag full of big vintage plastic ones, suitable for hats,
and handmade paper made into books with wonderful shabby pieces of leather for covers, and a cord to tie them closed.
I bought three .. Akira and Naho bought quite a lot. the vendor gave them a couple of tiny books for free.
then we wandered off down some of the tiny back streets, near where I found this entrance on Saturday;
all very pretty, and we found a shop full of American forties and fifties industrial furniture down here.
perfect for the new addition to the Mina store in Kyoto.
the more Akira looked the more he added to the list of things to be shipped to Japan.
the young Dutch guy was quite taken aback, he hadn’t expected to sell everything so quickly.
Akira explained that they were going to make patchwork quilts and cushions from their fabrics, and this sort of furnishing would be perfect to show it off. to fit out a shop, it would not be so much really. of course shipping to japan is an expense, but in a shipping container, packed well, which the owner explained he would do himself ….. he was falling over backwards to be helpful.
after this excitement we walked back to Tamago, and I started my rather protracted trip home – the train back to Eindhoven turned out to be problematic, and it took me an hour longer than it should have, but the rest of the journey went smoothly. I was sad to leave my friends, but inspired by our weekend.
amsterdam two – tamago
a new shop is a blank slate, a design opportunity, and Tamago in Amsterdam’s Spieglegraft (number thirteen) have taken it and run with it, helped by Akira Minagawa’s ideas and his experience with the two mina perhonen stores in Japan.
all the garment hanging installation down one side of the shop is wrought iron, a european version of how mina is organised in the Kyoto store. we added wound wool in grey and yellow, to soften some harsh edges.
Akira spent the whole day before the opening drawing flowers in black felt-tip pen on translucent white-waxed paper, which he cut out
and stuck on the double height wall above the staircase with little strips of masking tape torn up by Saemi.
the stairs are solid wood, beautifully made by the Japanese carpenter from Kyoto who worked on the store there, the railing a kind of modern art nouveau in metalwork.
put together on sheer adrenaline, this wall looks perfect, a typical Minagawa touch.
then working until one thirty am selecting the arrangement of the clothes
the counter is made from a walnut tree from Simon and Christine’s garden. all the wood in the shop warms the space and echoes the beautiful ancient wood beams in the ceilings. this building is, like all the others in this part of Amsterdam, seventeenth century, and built on ten to twelve metre wood piles sunk into the peat and clay of the tidal basin of the river Amstel.
starting again at eight in the morning, the decoration was finished by eleven, in time for photos and the party at one.� flower arrangements at the same time glamorous and quirky, the signature egg (tamago is japanese for egg)
eggs as flowers
a synthesis of the poetic and the sophisticated, just like the clothes.
revolutionary storm umbrellas by Senz, covered with Mina fabrics. (you can see a delightful little animation advert for them here)
hats by me (and cardigans too)
beautiful blown glass vessels by Naho Iino
taking her turn at photographing the new project
after the professional photographer has made a record
shop owners Simon and Christine with Akira
and Sara the shepherd dog waits in the doorway for the visitors.
party food
four hours of intense socialising.
party over, we finish up the sandwiches.
the guests leave, and old friends catch up.
time to relax and recover.
watery viewpoints
a trip to Amsterdam in three parts; firstly water and boats.
on my first day� in the Netherlands I visited Tilberg with S to see the mina perhonen exhibition at the Texteil Museum
which was enchanting and beautiful and inspirational. afterwards we were persuaded to go to the de Pont Museum nearby,
to see the building – an impressive modern gallery, industrial style – and the Bill Viola installation there.
the only part of this collection of videos that we felt impelled to watch for its full time-span was the last one. mysterious pulsating navy blue water filled a deep rectangular screen, the sound-track a beating heart or a wave machine, something mechanical with a driving energy. for minutes altogether lapping shapes emerged and disappeared in the depths; light or bubbles glinted, at the base of the screen something more energetic appeared to be happening, until at last a shocking pale figure laced and bearded with elongated bubbles pierced the image from below with a roar of crashing water.
so, Amsterdam, a city full of water and boats, trees dropping their leaves in the water, coots and ducks and seagulls and a surprising numbers of cars, bicycles and clich�s. I walk along the side of one wide canal, admiring boats, and rafts of shaggy wild water plants.
up to the system of waterways curved around the centre of the old city, which I spend the morning exploring.
gold and russet leaves in the water draw my eye as the canal tour buses swirl past.
everywhere I look, pretty seventeenth century waterfront houses, boats, bikes, trees, birds, tourists and water bus wakes. how on earth can one find anything about Amsterdam that isn’t a clich�, while avoiding being run down by a cyclist?
Bill Viola’s video stays with me all morning as I gaze into the murky waters of the canals (clean water is cycled into them every twenty four hours).
an off the street life which is mysterious and inaccessible to the casual tourist.
the cool northern light reflected back by the water.
a small boat emerges from under a bridge, approaches, then turns and� zooms away again, a photographer aboard.
some of these barges do tours of home life on a barge. I see locked plastic bio-loos on some quiet canal-side streets, presumably for barge dwellers.
I am told that the canal tour buses are a great way to see Amsterdam.
everywhere you can hear the sad off-key clang of the trams’ warning bell. I don’t get to ride on a tram until I leave in a couple of days.
lee-boards. now there’s a thing. these essentially sailing boat stabilisers for flat bottomed boats only crept into my vocabulary about three weeks ago, and here they are on sailing barges, where they belong, and on this racy looking little motorboat, which seems very strange.
mesmerising� watershapes.
magnificent lee-boards
cheeky little chug-chug boat
an elegant green canoe
so many eye-catching boats
and grey reflections constantly changing
exhibition at Bircham gallery
I think the exhibition at the Bircham Gallery looks very good. the pots relate well to Elaine Cox’s paintings and we managed to place them so that they almost matched.
there were two internet sales before the show and one sold on Friday when we were putting it up.
Elaine’s paintings have wonderful surfaces, layered up and washed down again, then layered again, on torn paper with metallic paint areas and stained areas. you can’t see this at all from my photos. she is also a jewelery maker; you can get some idea of her work from this photo.
the ring on the bottom right hand corner has crushed ruby chips embedded in its rectangular enclosure.
and this pot, one of the anagama fired ones from 2007, had a lime pop hole, which was mended by my friend Gas Kimishima with Japanese lacquer and� gold powder, so it has a little badge of gold near its shoulder.
there is a lot of very new work in this show, so it’s nice to see it out of the workshop. this is the last one for a while, some time� next year I will have an exhibition at the Stour Gallery in Shipston on Stour. meanwhile I have a project to make some small porcelain pieces for Japan, for the Mina Perhonen shop in Kyoto. which is very exciting.
feasts and flowers
the culmination of three months work, Feast was set up and open this weekend in the Lund gallery in Easingwold. a curiously flat feeling ensued. of course, it’s quite grand and theatrical and brightly lit in a very newly converted building, so while it looks rather glamorous, it’s perhaps not quite the “ghostly banquet” I envisaged. ripped tablecloth, dust and cobwebs everywhere, old beams, earth floor, and a certain air of wabi-sabi might have been more appropriate.
a few of the bats which had to be housed in a separate part of the roof here, might have helped to produce a mood of decay and dissolution. however, it is also meant to be a celebratory piece, and I think it does that. the dogwood stems in the four vases, flushed dark red and reaching for the light, help to usher in Spring; their leaves will be sprouting soon.
closer up, the pots themselves have that crumbling darkness, the texture of times lost or forgotten, a reference to the life and death of past generations. so perhaps the eternal cycle of planting and harvest, I don’t know!
maybe the muslin wrong-foots it. there is something which is not quite working, I think.
you can see pictures of the whole group of pots on a web page here
back in Bale, a few flowers are poking though the mats of dead grass, which is mostly still looking pretty dormant. the first white violet on the verge in Clip Street.
in Cake’s lane clumps of primroses are exposed by the drastic february hedge trim.
it looks terrible, broken branches all over the place, and the brushwood shaved down to the ground, but without this treatment biannually, we would never see the primroses.
they are at the first stage and in another two weeks the clumps will be twice this size.
today I saw two roedeer in the wood. another magical moment, as we walked in parallel, stopping to look at each other. it was most likely a mother and daughter, the daughter a little smaller and behind, staring at us. their winter coats perfectly camouflage them against the bare trees. my dogs are a little calmer these days, and Tilda, blocked by my legs, didn’t make a sound, bless her.
another hollow oak has gone down across the lane. there are several waiting to fall. the last one was the home of tawny owls; I hope they have found a safer haven.
keren bgt deh nie tempatnya...suka hasil kerajianannya..porselin,,hemm keren
BalasHapus