an unexpected painting opportunity

So this morning I woke up to a painting bucket that was turned upside down. All four cats looked perfectly innocent... I contemplated freaking out, but the whole situation just made me laugh. It's one of those days...(and an all white floor would look kinda nice, no? ;-) )

clay to glass // glass to clay

Raw materials, calculating ingredients for recipes, measuring exact quantities, ... A challenge for this absent-minded brain but at the same time I love it! A bit of "work" for the playfulness that comes with good, well-measured recipes.

Some time ago I came across this simple clay recipe that consisted of 50% clay and 50% glass, for a clay body that was supposed to be wonderfully translucent. It was linked with the first European attempts in the 18th Century to recreate Chinese porcelain; at first they didn't manage to find the high firing recipe but developed several low firing ones, like the one I'm researching.

What fascinates me about this history isn't so much the fact that they did, in the end, find a real, high firing porcelain clay body but the wildly experimental, alchemical process of developing these recipes that have all sorts of interesting properties in themselves.

prior to mixing the batches: putting the necessary and clearly labeled quantities
of glass (square boxes in front with white powder) and clay
(soup buckets behind; greyish powder) together

It also tickles me to explore the boundaries between ceramics and glass. With a recipe like this, is it still clay? Does it look like glass or not? So what I'm doing now is making a binary series of this recipe: a gradual mix of the ingredients, with 100% clay on one side, and 100% glass on the other, and then I mix them with amounts of 10%.

The clay mix consists of 50% kaolin and 50% ball clay; the glass powder is the finest clear Bullseye frit.

This phase is very technical, there's not a lot of room for creativity yet... but I'm curious what will come out of it. If this goes well, I'll have a whole range of clay/glass bodies to play with!

the clay part is in itself a mix of two clays:
kaolin (this is the white powder; the main ingredient in porcelain)
 and ball clay (greyish powder; a very plastic clay)

making clay: adding clay powder to a certain amount
 of water (and mixing and sieving again later on)

More photos of the working process on flickr!

inside the lines

What do you do with a thick, lined, grey notebook? 

Filling it with color. 

reading by candlelight: "The creative habit" by Twyla Tharp

Work? What I live for. 
Play? Work.

This is a little snippet from Tharp's creative autobiography, one of the exercises in the book. It gives you an idea of how she writes: I love her direct and accessible language, and even just in the words you can feel the rhythm and movement coming through - she dances in her texts!

I've been looking for a certain lecture she gave (in the 90's I think) where she was talking and started to make little movements with her hands and body as a companion to her words. It was fascinating! Words can only express so much, I love how she emphasised it with her movements. I can't find it right now but will keep looking and post it when I do. For now, if you're not familiar with her vast oeuvre, have a look at her homepage: www.twylatharp.org

Tharp, Twyla & Reiter, Marc. The creative habit: learn it and use it for life: a practical guide. Simon & Schuster, New York, 2003. Worldcat

the kick wheel

So I was in need of a potter's wheel for the ceramics studio, searched for it for a long time. Electrical throwing wheels are pretty expensive, and my "studio" (which is just the old garage) doesn't have any electricity yet, so I got this rather romantic idea of finding an old mechanical one; a kick wheel. I envisioned hauling it into the garden during the summer and working en plein air... (yeah, I guess I have some hippy tendencies! Hehe)

This machine is operated by kicking the big wheel underneath with your foot, which takes some getting used too coordinating hands and foot... it also turns a lot slower than an electrical wheel, although you wouldn't get that impression from my silly little time-lapsy video. Enjoy the demonstration and an unimpressed Assepoes!

Happy world animal day!

Assepoes in clair-obscur, in the very last sunrays of the evening

Hello surface!

the tulip bulbs are eager to go underground again...

It almost seems to have become a yearly ritual, returning to this virtual home of a blog in October. I like the term "resurfacing", as if life takes part under the surface of the earth for a period, seemingly inexistent...until it suddenly pops up again, showing its face. Springtime in autumn, hehe.

Well, most of my invisible, underground work in the previous months consisted of dealing with Dad's Alzheimer's and the changes it brought to his and our lives, and working on my Master's thesis for art history (which I finished in August). It has been a turbulent period but we're all in a better place now than we were before. And in the mean time I've also been adjusting to a new town, to this new (old) house and a neglected garden that I've been tending to.

Creatively I haven't been as prolific this past year as I wanted, as I needed to focus on other issues. So even my creativity went underground. Luckily the garden has been a great teacher. Getting my hands dirty, learning about the soil, the plants, doing garden archeology, finding "treasures" (well... mostly just rusty beer bottle caps really, lol) and learning about the people who lived here before and how they treated the garden... And the best thing about a neglected garden, is that your imagination can take it anywhere!

Off you grow! Have a look at the garden journal on flickr and the inspiration for it on Pinterest.