Not-So Wretched Excess

I’ll admit that I don’t like recycling my clay.  As in, I don’t like dealing with it.  As a handbuilder, it seems crazy to keep a big vat of gross-looking and feeling shbluh to slop onto plaster bats and wedge back to existence.  Most of my scraps come from leather hard edges and bits of slabs. Historically, I have dealt with these bits in two ways. One: let them dry out, smash them into powder, and add water to make slip.  I do use a lot of slip.  Two: neatly stack, wrap tightly and carefully in plastic, with all intention of coming back and doing, well, something with them.  The result is a lot of mysterious looking wrapped stacks of slab bits that are hopelessly dry or possibly molding.

Gross.

In a fit of exasperation over this, and over the generally labored method  of my work, I made these little, well, I think adorable, bits of stamped and textured porcelain. I played like a child. It was great.

They will be test tiles for some of the interactive pigments from Georgie’s.  They are also part of a larger plan, probably.

Speaking of a larger plan, I do want to talk at least briefly about the piece with all the dotted cups.

Not a great photo, but it’s what I’ve got for the moment–

This is called I Can’t Forget that I’m Bereft, a line from Robert Browning’s “Pied Piper of Hamelin.”  So it is about the loss of children.

By that I mean the twenty children murdered in Newton last December.

It is also about my own anxiety and obsessive behaviors, and about what it is like to be trapped in a spell.

Saying help, help, help.