Reflection on final work for Bachelors of Fine Art

Domesticated |A 2019 Project | 18/1/2020

And God blessed them: and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. 

Genesis 1 | 28

The Anthropocene. Three hundred years riding a roller coaster of cultivation, exploration and segregation of the land. A new era. Human's have dominated and chastised the landscape for daring to show its own agency. How can mother nature speak down to us, has she not realized that her once weak child has grown into an adult. An adult capable of controlling the surroundings from whence they came. The human race, we find ourselves

ordered, yet contaminated,

rich, yet malnourished,

powerful, yet weak in action.

The epoch of the human is before us, if it not to end us.

A lion in a cage. The landscape in districts.

50,181,019,638 square meters per year

137482245 square meters per day

5728426 square meters per hour

95473 square meters per minute

1591 square meters per seconds

By the time you have started and finished this sentence an area the size of Kanye West's and Kim Kardashion's 22 Million dollar mega mansion has been lost to farmland; stricken of its wildness and tamed for human consumption this land has been claimed and immersed into our society. 7.4 acres of gluttony and market forces. No longer wild, no longer foreign, we create mono cultures of flora that soak into the soil and swell to blanket our hills, our valleys, our planet. We no longer live on the planet, we live on our planet.

Domesticated | 2019 | 240cm x 90cm

This series of work came at an important time for me. I became obsessed with portraying a "natural" landscape under the thumb of humanity. So many aspects I controlled to preserve the domineering quality of mankind. Clay a symbol for the earth was formed in molds. These cookie cutter plots were to be fill with domesticated grasses. Hinting with the smell of barbecue, my landscape was fired in a mix of wood, ash and oils. This cauldron of smoke, tar and carcinogens permanently leaves the landscape scarred with a thick grease. I burnt and smoldered these pots while listening to radio which reach out to me with the sounds of an Amazonian valley burning. It was then I realized it wasn't the fire that was spreading it was us. We have the harbingers of our destiny and the bringers of our doom. Like a wave rolling towards we sit in the shallows ignoring the power that is being unleashed. Into my desecrated vessels I filled agriculturally certified soil to which wheat was planted. The invasive plants took a quick liking to the soil manifesting it's destiny they took the soil as theirs. This colonization and occupation of a landscape is permanently documented in a attempt to capture a slow moving, yet fleeting moment.

As I reflect on a years work I'm lain in despair. Our own country is burning. The land parched and set alight. The Amazonian fires that helped to dictate this work have spread to my own backyard. Choked in smoke and peering through a haze I see these two fires are one of the same. We have become the arsonist's of our planet. Burning and churning through through the land till nothing is left to live unto itself. We have ripped opened Pandora's box only to find a reflection of ourselves. We will face retribution for our choices, our ethics, our hubris. The Anthropocene, the dawn of man and the dusk of our planet.

“there stand two urns, the one filled with evil gifts, and the other with good ones. He for whom Jove the lord of thunder mixes the gifts he sends, will meet now with good and now with evil fortune; but he to whom Jove sends none but evil gifts will be pointed at by the finger of scorn, the hand of famine will pursue him to the ends of the world, and he will go up and down the face of the earth, respected neither by gods nor men. “ 

Homer: The Illiad 

24. BOOK XXIV 

Image source NASA (https://www.nasa.gov/images/content/386905main_moorhead_tm5_2009253.jpg)

Sculp sketch #2 | Clay's Character

Ordinary Forms of Continuity in Space 12/1/2020

Enjoying the feel of clay. The best part of the whole process is the process. The rhythmic thumping, pulling, twisting; finding forms buried below the surface. For me my sculptural sketches aren't so much a construction as much as they are an excavation. Peeling off loose forms in my mind and trying to throw them onto the plinth before they can be lost. I love this way of working. Moving quick, not burnishing the clay too much to embrace the materials you are working with. I keep each session to about 30 minutes. It is crucial to keep the session short and succinct. Like a paleontologist brushing away at a fossil one must work to release the skeleton from the soil but not work too hard as to brush away fragile details.


Clay, ugh, it's too easy to get lost in clay. Every material has a personality. Metamorphic rock's like marble, are stoic, strong and proud; you have to work against this institution of crystallized rock to find it's character. Slowly tearing at the fringes you will uncover the veins of minerals hidden deep underneath. Clay though, clay lacks the stoicism it is willing to adapt and change.

There exists that one person. The lone individual whom the whole room pays attention to, they don't look at you, they don't speak, but they hold their grace and presence so well that everyone is drawn to them. Their beauty is intimidating and respected from afar. You may dare to strike up a conversation, but only if you acknowledge they aren't going to make life easy for you. If you are able to understand these one sided power dynamics you may appreciate them for whom they truly are; for that is the temperament of marble.

That one character though. That one person whose got that energetic personality. So fluid and interchanging. Such a draw, they pull you in. That bombastic nature forever reacting to what's around them. They vibe off you, you vibe off them. A beauty, that can only be appreciated in-hand, a beauty that's only appreciated in the moment, a beauty that is more about connection than individualism; that is the temperament of clay.

It is not what is seen on the surface that counts, but what is not seen. This root is what matters... In the unseen root, the real power, the real strength of an object lies. 

-Shoji Hamada

Ode to feldspar

Glaze thoughts 8/1/2020

Glaze, the impervious layer that hugs its ceramic core. Glaze, the glistening coating that makes pottery glow with an aura of it's own. Glaze, the soft skin whose surface we kiss with each sip of a vessel.

Oh, but what is glaze? An archaic rock? A splintering glass? A cascading liquid?

Glaze, the shape-shifter of the ceramic world should never be defined as merely one thing, for it's magic lies in it's transitions.

Feldspar, the Earth's ready made glaze. It's a glaze cake mix, that you can add your own ingredients and or subtleties to. Responding consistently to the cooking process feldspar's form the foundation of many recipes. This mineral starts it's journey deep within the Earth's mantle. A magma soup of silica, aluminum and various metal oxides, together they dance around a revolving sun of iron and nickel. This swirling pool of liquid rock will occasionally peep it's head out into the caverns below our feet. Constantly creeping, it will carve it's way through through impassible rock, occasionally climaxing to spill onto the Earth's surface. Once this fierce demon from the underworld has grown tired, it will cool, leaving veins of petrified feldspar in its wake. From a liquid to a solid this glaze rests in it's new settled state. Keen to sleep, the being rests, not waking for eons.

Our eyes rest upon a rocky outcrop. Fire and brimstone made dormant, the view is calm yet menacing. The splintered slab stands defiantly, tantalizing us with what it hides beneath it's shawl. Our eye's rest upon a white seam stretching the length of the volcanic tomb.
There it is.

We thrash at the Earth till we shave off fragments of this glorious feldspar. From fragments, we make powders and from powders we make glaze.

Glaze, the cream for which our pots will be smothered in. A white,viscous liquid it firms as it touches the dry barren clay. Together, the glaze and the clay will forever consummate their connection within the kiln firing.

Whoossssssh.

The burners light. A flame's tongue whips around the kiln flooding the pot with an amber glow. Slowly as the inferno blazes, the feldspar feels itself transitioning into a new state. No longer a dry powder it forms into a molten mass. Free to finally move, the glaze draws itself closer to the Earth from whence it came. Dripping slowly the glaze is self-governing and loose, the material's agency is restored.

STOP. Gas burners, halted. Flue's closed. Cool down begins.

The pot holds it's amber glow, the feldspar fusing into long glass chains, finally we have a glaze.

I'm always in awe at what can survive the violence of a kiln firing. 1280 degrees of flame and damnation is a lot to overcome. Strontium, calcium, tin, these are all elements that would have combusted long before we could reach our target temperature. To survive a kiln is to survive the nine rings of hell. Birthed in the scorched cauldron of our inner planet feldspar's continue to overcome the greatest of stresses. Much like the phoenix through flame and fire they rebirth into a new, more astonishing form. They are godly. This material endures pain, torment, and stress and yet leaves with kiln with such beauty, such grace, such subtly that you start that think it feels at home in the cauldron.

"Your energy charges my voice, it radiates my heart;

Now I am alive with the ore of words pouring

From my lips like molten lava glittering with joy.”

Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, Words of paradise

Feldspar crystal (18×21×8.5 cm) from Jequitinhonha valley, Minas Gerais, southeastern Brazil

IMAGE 1

Photocredit @/janellelow_   http://www.janellelow.com/

IMAGE 2

Image source (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Feldspar-Group-291254.jpg)

Sculpt sketch #1 | Clay planet

Opening up 2/1/2020

Starting in the studio in 2020 with quick movements and worn textures. It feels so good to get back into playing with clay. The universal medium, the material that inscribed the epic of Gilgamesh and a  toy for Rodin to cast his bronze creatures. Human's have always been drawn towards the trans-formative nature of clay. 

 And Jehovah God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul 

Genesis 1 Line 7

We have always been driven to document ourselves from what we dig out from Earths shell. It's perhaps such a  beautiful coincidence we live on a clay planet. Silicon Dioxide the bricks to Aluminium's mortar provides us with what we need for clay. 

The top three elements in our Earth's crust are silicon, aluminium, and oxygen. The holy trinity to which water can be added to make a strong material whose grain unlike wood can be shifted, changed and altered at a whim. We often talk about how we are in the Goldilocks zone of solar system. A little further out we would have turned into cold husk delegated to the universe's freezer, a little closer we would of become a burnt snag of a planet, too inedible for life. What we often miss in these discussions is how we are in the Goldilocks zone for clay. Planets like mercury have a thick iron core wrapped in a thin silica sheet. Mercury's close proximity to the son drew it near to the heavier elements in our system and burdened it heart with a heavy center. Earth on the other hand has a small iron core, yet thick sheets of silicon making up the mantle and crust. Our proximity as the third planet gave us the perfect path to collect the clouds of silicon that helped birth our planet. Lighter than iron but heavier than oxygen we found our planet in a orbital valley of clay materials.

Since humans could dig we have scratched into the crust using the materials to document ourselves. These materials have dictated how we see ourselves and how we define what our society. When the ancient Mesopotamian's embraced agriculture, they showed their love in the forms of a female deity and they created those deities in clay! When the classical Athenian Andokides needed to document the history of his Gods he turned to clay. When the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huangs died he would share his tomb with the army of mercenaries and armed men who had preserved his power. These men were sculpted from clay and fired to cone 06 to preserve them for as long the emperor needed his terracotta warriors. We have forever and will always turn to clay as both a reflection and documentation of ourselves.


If Adam, created of the earth, was made in God's image then we clearly have a clay planet birthed of a clay God.