Saturday, January 20, 2018
Installation and Site Specific Spring 2018
Dani Acevedo
Christian Ard
Maddie Gahafer
Ilyssa Harrington
Conrad Kane
Hannah Laakso
Jessie Reulbach
Marina Rossi
Tyler Schroeder
Annie Thompson
Lauren Trimarco
Christian Ard
Maddie Gahafer
Ilyssa Harrington
Conrad Kane
Hannah Laakso
Jessie Reulbach
Marina Rossi
Tyler Schroeder
Annie Thompson
Lauren Trimarco
Tuesday, January 9, 2018
The Clay Will Tell You How You Are
BY
My fourth ceramics class began and ended calamitously, despite high expectations and a building confidence.
Working at the wheel, where I’d handily “thrown” a pot on my first try weeks before, my task was to wedge the clay to remove air and inconsistency, knead it into balls the size of oranges, slam them one at a time on the bull’s-eye of the wheel, and then hit the accelerator.
This first step — centering the clay — is much harder than it sounds, requiring stillness and concentration from the potter. Even if the clay is properly positioned when the wheel is stationary, a challenging task in itself, the flattened ball of clay can easily begin a wild wobble once the wheel begins its counter-clockwise spin.
The foot pedal, not used properly, adds to the problem. You need to reach it, without looking down, then apply exactly the right pressure. The brake and the accelerator are at opposite ends of the same pedal. Stomp your heel on the brake instead of your toe on the accelerator and the wheel screeches to a halt. Make the same mistake in reverse, accelerating instead of breaking when trying to slow the wheel down, and you’re driving 80 mph in a 45 mph zone.
On this night, neither hands nor feet would obey me. For two hours, the wild wobble at my wheel went from bad to worse until the clay became a projectile — flying once, twice, three times off the wheel, breaking apart and lodging in unreachable places in the splash pan. The catch basin filled with ruined clay and dirty water fit only for the recycle bin.
As my exasperation mounted, along with embarrassment that my classmates and teacher were watching, the clay took charge of me, not the other way around. Pressing the mound down beneath my palms, squeezing it up from the sides, opening the top with my fingers and then widening that opening, were distant memories from the early class. My hands were not mindfully guiding the clay but trying to force it to do my bidding. My feet didn’t seem attached to the rest of my body. Something I had done rather intuitively two weeks ago was no longer part of my muscle memory.
The flying wheel not only launched the clay into the splash pan, which would take an hour to clean at the end of class, but into the lap of the person to my left and the shoulder of the person to my right. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I mumbled, fighting back tears.
One teacher offered me wine (“No, thank you”). He urged me to take a walk (I did), have a glass of water (I found the fountain), and, most importantly of all, try to breathe. He adjusted my hands by cradling them in his own. He bent to move the pedal that had skidded across the floor so my foot could reach it. He eased my flailing leg back where it belonged.
The other teacher, good-humoredly, told me everyone had bad days and she wasn’t surprised that mine was today as Mercury was in retrograde, a time when life can go haywire, according to astrologers.
I don’t put any stock in astrology. I find “What’s your sign?” one of the most foolish questions in the world. I was still comforted — even after I got home and checked Google, only to find the most recent retrograde period was September 19 to October 9. My pottery mishap occurred on October 12. Oops.
“So what?” I decided. I’d rather be under the influence of the planets than responsible for myself.
Even twitching, blushing, and fighting the urge to flee the classroom, I still learned one precious lesson. “The clay will tell you how you are,” the teacher said, even if the message is that you’re in a very bad place.
The previous classes — making pinch pots, scoring and attaching coils, working at the rambunctious wheel — had begun with me centered, and then centered me even further.
Were these two hours fun like those other classes? Nope. Did I risk getting clay all over my iPhone by taking proud pictures? No, as I’d made nothing and the only thing to photograph was my corner of the room, slathered in wayward clay. Still, this new adventure has already succeeded beyond my wildest expectations.
I wanted to get out of my head and into my body, to silence the jabbering “monkey mind” that Buddhists warn make one unsettled, restless, confused. Swimming has always done that for me by counting laps: “One, one, one. Two, two, two. Three, three, three…” to crowd out thinking. Ceramics could quiet me, too, or send an instant signal that I was in a bad place, that I needed to slow myself down, breathe, control the clay, and let the wheel do its work.
Like a balancing pose in yoga, ceramics provides a perfect feedback loop: exit your body and enter your busy mind, and you will likely teeter and fall. Or, in this case, try to bully the clay with strength, not stillness, and it turns into a guided missile rather than a bowl.
The saving grace of this last class was that it nudged me in this direction of learning. It provided welcome calm, however belated, not at the wheel but at the sink. There, long after the others had gone, I was still washing the splash pan and a dozen tools I had used that were now unrecognizable under the gobs of clay.
As hot water ran over my hands, and I squeezed sponge after sponge until one was clean enough to scrub my work area, my breathing slowed and my shoulders unclenched and moved away from my ears.
The teacher’s voice followed me out the door:
“The more you get aggravated, the more you get aggravated.”
Source is On Being. Link below.
I suggest going to the link and reading the comments/discussion.
Many folks contribute their thoughts about clay.
Joe Joe Provenza, Student Work
Spell of the Sensuous chapter 7 response
A drawing of the air around me 30 min: graphite on paper
"Air is the most pervasive presence I can name, enveloping, embracing, and caressing me both inside and out, moving in ripples along my skin, flowing between my fingers, swirling around my arms and thighs, rolling in eddies along the roof of my mouth, slipping ceaselessly through throat and trachea to fill the lungs, to feed my blood, my heart, my self." Page 225.
This is a self-portrait on a base level, but the idea of spatial existence is deconstructed. Although it is a drawing of myself from life, it is more focused on the visual perception of self and how visual information is essentially just a sensory reading of proportional, physical, and biological indicators.
Joe Joe Provenza, Student Work
One of the main themes of this piece is altering expendable objects that don't ever seem to change. I picked two bricks that live outside of the art building at Flagler. These bricks would be easy to replace but they have been in the same place since I remember.
Milk is a metaphor commonly used in my work as a symbol of cultural lust and the extraction of consciousness. The idea of milk teeth revolves around a certain conditioning to this lust for insignificance, almost showing a reversion to Freud's oral psychosexual phase in which one only has the mental capability to worry about themselves.
The white lighter was a found object which has an eerie cultural significance and also symbolizes man's greatest innovations reduced to an expendable plastic object.
Milk is a metaphor commonly used in my work as a symbol of cultural lust and the extraction of consciousness. The idea of milk teeth revolves around a certain conditioning to this lust for insignificance, almost showing a reversion to Freud's oral psychosexual phase in which one only has the mental capability to worry about themselves.
The white lighter was a found object which has an eerie cultural significance and also symbolizes man's greatest innovations reduced to an expendable plastic object.
Chance Powers, Student Work
This response to David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous (page 137-153) is relating to the section on page 137, "Or, more specifically, how did civilized humankind lose all sense of reciprocity and relationship with the animate natural world, that rapport that so influences (and limits) the activities of most indigenous, tribal peoples?"
When I read this section, immediately I thought of the DAPL issue. From day one, it seems white people have been screwing over natives. As said in Disney's Pocahontas, "These white people are dangerous."
For this response, I took one of my photos from when I was in Portugal of Padrao dos Descobrimentos as it was a monument in celebration and commemoration of discovering and claiming that land.
The monument is a huge symbol for claiming land, which means whoever is there is forced to accept the rule or be pushed out, punished, jailed, killed, all that fun stuff.
The DAPL is punishing natives for no reason by threatening their water supply, essentially pushing them out of the very little land we "allowed" them to have, desecrating their graves and land in the process.
I layered photos to create this piece. There is a filter layer on top of that cracked, dry land, free of water and life. The picture over that is of the protests going on because of DAPL (credits to Kevin Scott Cuevas of the Odyssey and Jeremiah Jones of Countercurrent News).
I wanted to overshadow the vision of victory with the real costs of these conquers.
Lauren Gonzalez, Student Work
Title: Hebrew
Materials: Wood
Dimensions: 13" x 5"
Spell Reading #4 The Flesh of Language, pp. 73 - 91
On page 77, the last sentence of the first paragraph
"Language, in this view, is rather like a code; it is a way of representing actual things and events in the perceived world"
Artist Statement: This entire chapter really focused on language and it's origins. This specific sentence made me think of language as a literal code. It also makes me think of language as a bunch of signs arranged in random sequence. I decided to literally translate the original sentence into hebrew, and burn the words into a piece of wood. I chose hebrew because the language is foreign to me and I see it a a type of "code.
Lauren Gonzalez, Student Work
Title: Experimentation
Materials: Compact makecup container, and rabbit fur
Spell #3 Philosophy on the way to Ecology, Part II, pp. 44 - 72
Found on page 48, the bottom of the first paragraph
"Since humans alone are a mixture of extended matter and thinking mind, we alone are able to feel and to experience our body's mechanical sensations. Meanwhile, all other organisms, consisting solely of extended matter, are in truth nothing more than automatons, incapable of actual experience unable to feel pleasure or suffer pain. Hence, we humans need have no scruples about manipulating, exploiting or experimenting upon other animals in any manner we see fit"
Artist Statement: The text above shows humans as having no empathy or compassion towards animals, especially the last sentence. It literally states that we as humans do not need scruples when exploiting or experimenting on animals in any manner we see fit. I wanted to create something that dealt with animal testing, because it is a practice that directly deals with experimentation and exploitation. Rabbits are one of the most commonly tested on animals, especially when it comes to cosmetics. I decided to place real rabbit fur in a blush compact case. I bought the rabbit fur from hobby lobby and cut a piece out to replace the blush. This is a literal consequence of using makeup that has been tested on animals, thousands of animals die and people still buy the products.
Jake Carlson, Student Work
Artificial Roses
Three foot tall sculpture placed in ground at Palm Garden on Flagler Campus.
Jake Carlson, Student Work
Petroleum
Projection of video piece on top of aquarium, milk bottle, and mixed media panels.
Jake Carlson, Student Work
Video Link:
https://youtu.be/fpzPfM8C0b0https://youtu.be/fpzPfM8C0b0
N.O.W.
This performance questions the identity of figures made into statues, while paying a respect to them in a way to create meaning. Across the country we see statues of typically the upper class bureaucrat, standing on land that was once utilized by Native American tribes. It is site specific in the sense that it took place at the statute of Pedro Melendez in St. Augustine, however it uses this site to steer the viewer of questioning the identity of statutes around them. The idea of brushing off the shoes of this statute enhances the power that this figure had and continues to evoke. History books recite a narrative that sites such as Mount Rushmore are iconic landmarks in America, however they are carved into sacred land once belonged to native tribes. As a student in 2017, this performance illustrates the idea of contemporary power. The power of institutions, wealth and corporations. The power of establishing identity only for the profit of one’s self. Earning respect in our current landscape is based off of a value system that has been corrupted. Statues are permanent, worshipped symbols of power. Who was powerful, who gained respect, and who established their power. This performance questions the burdened respect that statues demand.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)