Steve Harrison
2007
The Hand of the Other
'Depth of Feeling' 2007 204 x 197 105mm
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Steve Harrison
2007 The Hand of the Other
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'Depth of Feeling' 2007 204 x 197 105mm |
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The Hand
of the Other We find ourselves in an era of shallow consumerism and apparent wealth in a material sense, but we have never been poorer in time and quality. We seem to be losing our sense of locality and community, our corner shops and our independent Australian identity. My response to this excess of meaningless consumption is to immerse myself in the hand-crafted, intentionally imperfect object as an antidote to this avalanche of new cheap junk. My recent work in this show is the result of many years of research. It follows my last show at the Legge Gallery in Sydney of black ware that I called 'dirty little secrets'. I was attracted to the intense blackness of this iron-rich rock. It was black, Rothko black, as black as Churchill's dog. The blackness suited my mood at that time, a period of intense introspection, from which emerged some lovely dark pieces, lifted by the use of paler pastel glazes, all made from my local environment. My recent work has been described by Toni Warbuton as "radical localism" (1) as it is almost entirely made from locally prospected raw materials. Much of it is made from my local native bai tunze porcelain stone, this is not clay in the normal sense, but ground-up rock. Ground rock dust isn't the most promising material to work with, but apart from the limited plasticity, which restricts the scale and form of the pieces, there are many fine qualities that my materials exhibit when wood fired. I am particularly fond of the intense red and orange flashed porcelain body colour. Flashed porcelain isn't all that common, it intrigues me that it can still be translucent and, when coupled with the right glaze, it can be sublime. My most recent work concentrates on this lovely flashed, naturally impure porcelain stone. I have been honing my skills as an artist with these materials and feel that this body of work is the culmination of so much study and research, involving the hand selection of every stone, its crushing, grinding and eventual reforming to produce these unique pieces. Likewise the glazes are all created and fired using the same alchemy and attention to detail. Simple stones, ashes, clay and lime can be transmuted into soft pastel translucent colour with the hardness and durability of porcelain. I've thought a lot about my bowls and how I work with them, Socrates urged me to examine my bowls well as the unexamined bowl is a bowl not made. Over the past 30 years of ceramic practice, wood firing and fossicking I have made some good pots and many more bad ones. I have been inspired by the rich surfaces that I have been able to create from my unique approach, methods and materials, while being compelled to progress by my failures. Sometimes my pots come out much as I imagined them and at other times the pots were not as expected, but I recognised that they were still either better or worse than anticipated. Just every now and then I have made pots that I am not entirely able to claim credit for (in their finished form), as they seem to have made themselvles to some extent, it is this precise quality that has intrigued me in particular recently. These pots started life like any other, created with just as much attention to detail and then glazed, packed and fired with equal effort and consideration. However, because 'shit happens', there are the inevitable kiln collapses, stray wood stokes, explosions and disasters. Unpacking events like these can be a bit depressing, perhaps more so than the usual post-firing blues and initially these pieces were consigned to the pot-holes in my driveway, where most of my work goes; all of the indifferent, the bad and the ugly. Over time I have learnt to look very closely at my work and I never crush anything in haste anymore. I have become practised at seeing the unexpected possibilities of beauty in these 'bads' turned 'goods'. These damaged goods can often be liberated from their cohort of dross and polished to an unexpected state of grace. I make my work as perfectly as I can, as a lot of it is porcelain and must be thrown and turned evenly and precisely to allow the translucency to show evenly. I can't see any point in trying to compete with machine perfection, that is so readily and cheaply available. However, if I were to consciously twist or bend my pots on the wheel, I wouldn't be able to turn them evenly, and if I were to distort them after turning, I would feel a little self-conscious about it. Porcelain needs to be turned so much drier than plastic bodies and it would need to be re-hydrated to make it soft enough to allow for fluid, plastic deformation. There is something about an intentionally distorted form that to my eye is never quite as satisfying as that naturally occurring undulation of a finely potted rim. If the warping occurs naturally in the fire, while it is pyro-plastic, then the movement can be very soft and elegant, but more importantly it can take on the aura of being enhanced by the very nature of its making, and not directly from my hand. These otherly enhanced works have a good measure of 'mana' about them, and I like that. They are a gift in the sense that they are not directly created, but become special by a process beyond self, a process where something other intervenes. One of my unexpected discoveries is a deposit of 'halloysite' bai tunze material. This halloysite has a mind of its own. I never know quite what to expect, and there is something very engaging about that. Halloysite clay mineral is very much like kaolin, with the distinction that it has an extra water molecule attached to the clay crystal that seems to make it curl up like a rolled up newspaper; it has a weird tendency to unwind on drying out in the early stages of the firing. This unwinding might be the cause of the strange and unpredictable warping and cracking that can sometimes be associated with its use. I love this unknowable quality, the intervention by the Hand of the Other. Modern middle-class life in the western world has created the expectation of 'everything on demand'. As viewed through our cultural lens we have been lulled into the false expectation that everying in our lives can, and will, be perfect. We lead perfectly controlled lives. I, on the other hand, feel an attraction to the otherness of my mistakes, perhaps it's the out-of-self-ness of the accident. Perhpas it's a need to experience and express the unknowable, that is so little experienced in the lifestyle of perfection. Nearly all of my favourite pots today have this otherness, they have been altered by the process of their making and it is something about this sense of the 'other' which is added to an already good pot that gives it its extra quality or 'mana'. This added value is true even where what is added is in fact a void where part of the pot is missing. It is said that a scar can make a man more intriguing or attractive, and Nietzche observed that whatever doesn't kill us makes us stronger (2). The same can be true of pots, just as a period of difficulty and trial can sometimes fashion our own character in a better way. Maybe these otherly beautied objects are an insight into Otto's numinous made tangible (3)? There are many ways of knowing and perhaps Coue was right in affirming that every day in every way my bowls are getting better (4); or perhaps Harris, who maintained that my bowl is OK and your bowl is OK (5). I don't know, but I've seen the light, and it comes through the wall of a translucent red-flashed porcelain bowl in such a way that I can see the colour of the outside flashed clay from the inside. I couldn't have imagined this was possible until it happened to me without warning. One of those moments that can change you. Now that I am more aware of the possibilities of these damaged goods, I encourage a certain degree of uncertainty in the packing and firing of the kiln so that there is always the possibility of that little extra expected, but as yet still unknown something, an otherness, a something beyond the known that may be added. I have become quite adept at placing my work in the kiln and firing it in such a way that can potentially transform an otherwise ordinary bowl into an outstanding bowl, and then again it can just be another bent bowl. Some people have called these events 'accidents', but where they are planned they cannot truly be called accidents. This is an exercise in skill development, just as draughting, throwing or handforming is a skill. The art is in the intellectual exercise of decision making and the eventual judgement as to whether the pot is worth showing or not. The results are always unknown but close to the limits of my technique and imagination. In calling up the numinous I get a glimpse of The Other in my work and I like to believe that I have imbued some degree of 'mana' into these bowls. When I was young I wanted to believe that there were some absolutes in life. I wanted to believe that there could be a definition of such concepts as truth and beauty. As I've grown up and out, I've come to realise that there will not be any absolutes in my life (other than death and taxes). I have had to come to terms with the fact that good and evil, truth and lies, beauty and ugliness are all relative and co-exist in each of us all of the time. I have learnt to accept the 'duality of light', that it is both a particle and a wave-form simultaneously - the point being that you find what you look for. If you look for a particle, you find a particle. If you look for a wave-form, you find a wave-form. I've been looking for the Hand of the Other in my work and I think that I've found it. 1.
Toni Warbuton, Journal of Australian Ceramics Vol. 46, No. 1, 2007. pp
22-24 |
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