Poem for Tenmoku

 It is a delicious black ice crystallised glaze,

Named Tenmoku it has long been awarded rich praise

Both for its colour and for its the shine,

It has a history for a finish on which to sip and dine

Originally religious in nature the glazes strict definition has since changed and departed 

But in order to understand that journey have to retell the monastic tale of where it all started 

You are a Zen buddhist monk in the 13th century

You must venture to china, its pilgrimage to study, not a holiday for pleasantries 

As you cross stormy waters you are lashed with waves so that nothing will remain dry 

And across the plains you trek and the mountains you climb until you reach your monastic destination, a place revered as heaven's eye.

Up on those Fujian hills you learn the words that bring you closer to Nirvana 

You are taught of those who came before before you, you learn of the Bodhidharma

Join in and practice amongst the other monks drinking tea

Learn from the Chan Buddhist elders and set your thinking free

Store everything that you can take in on that high mountain 

So when you venture back you can release your wisdom like a pressurised fountain

You may not know it, but you pilgrimage will bring more than just faith across the Yellow Sea

It will bring a desire to Japan, a desire for the Tenmoku pots that housed your tea!

Potters and consumers will fall in love with that hematite sheen 

It’s such a striking finish it just requires to be seen!

As result of your return home there won’t just be more souls pursuing Nirvana,

But also Iron glazed tea bowls arriving freshly packaged in Japan’s many harbours

 

Confidence is key when you open up the well.

A new potter is a timid potter, it's the most immediate tell. 

Don’t dip your toes in only to jump out.

Don't spit and scream at the clay and please try not to shout.

You’re a ceramicist, a master of clay, commit to the action!

You are afterall a card carrying member of this clay bending faction. 

Have patience, have strength but most of all have conviction.

Don’t make a draft jump straight to the first edition,

You are making a pot, you aren’t pencilling fiction. 

Find the centre of the clay to commit with your thumbs.

Like a cyclone the centre of the clay is where the waves feel calm. 

Push down while you open up

Maybe clean your wheel head and tidy up the muck. 

Take your time but don't take away your courage, 

Because a potter that acts with boldness is a potter that will flourish. 

 Eyes closed and gunning for it with this one. 

Sometimes it's too easy to over perfect a work, too easy to lose the details while looking at the full picture. Too often I find my work over sculpted and over finalised. 

A good writing exercise is to write something you can barely remember. To explore a work through muted tones rather than just vivid ones. Sculpting this work is an equivalent exercise for me. To create a work exclusively through a sense of touch allows for looser ideas to be preserved. This process has provided me a way to explore amorphous realms of thought. These forms are closer to sketches than casts of finalised works. Sightless work revealing fresh perspectives and novel manifestations.

Video recording found~

Rory Young (@roryyoungartist) • Instagram photos and videos

 Persona-fired clay

2023

video peice

Multiple muses of the psychye captured frantically on film.

Form and figures collapse and emerge from the same mass of clay.

Material and energy not destroyed by merely transformed.

Recorded creation found ---

Rory Young (@roryyoungartist) • Instagram photos and videos

Nothing quite stains like Cobalt Blue 

For when colouring indigo the choices are too few 

Maybe I could choose copper in a alkaline glaze 

But I'm after a deep navy not a turquoise haze!

Cobalt forms with silica to produce the deepest of blues 

Overabundant in a glaze it may clump into purple hues 

It has been a telling feature of porcelain pots of the ming dynasty 

And has lined walls of the Persian Mosques,temples displaying piety

Seeking its use we have been driven to dig deep within the Earth 

And so for its value, violence and exploitation has given birth 

A mineral mined today not just for its glamour 

But instead to sell as a commodity under an auctioneer's hammer

It has graced the ceiling of Shahs 

And glossed the Fabergé eggs of Russian Tsars

But today, it is used instead to replace the batteries of the IPhone XR’s

On the mining communities the price of Cobalt has long since been inflicted

A story of bleeding lungs and glistening jewellery that is the story that Cobalt has depicted.

Grain

Every piece of clay has its own grain. Its own directions in which its subsections twist and contort. Clay is built of microscopic tile structures 200 times smaller than the width of a human hair. The texture of clay is felt in the way these flat clay-tiles are stacked. Ceramicists harbour the godly power to change the directions these particles align themselves to. 

Unlike stonemasons whose practice involves finding a grain of raw material and working around it, a wheel thrower can alter the raw material itself. The power of the pottery-wheel comes from its ability to steer the grain of any given clay body. 

I like to imagine when I first remove a piece of unwedged clay from a bag, how the mess of particles first align themselves. Configurations of particles initially point to every position in the universe,utter chaos distilled into a lump. We feel that turmoil as a kick but slowly through practice and process we pull this clay into a smooth form, spiralling its grain in on itself. From a tangled webb of flat crystals to a smooth structure lined up like a brick wall we find the forms we wish to create. From chaos to peace, a lump of clay aligns into a thrown pot.

Maybe that's why I return to the humm of the wheel for peace. For through the process of transforming disorder into order maybe too I transform my own thoughts. Between hands draped in slip and pots slowly drying in these moments I find myself truly centred. 

Pride

2023 ~revise~

My long outstretched arms softly wrap his body, the night has slowed down, the conversation flickering like the candles in my room. We talk through the usual third date convos, what I want to do, where he wants to be, how we plan to readjust ourselves.

"Fuck it” he says revising the pace of conversation.“we are queer you know.. we can do anything!" 

"Some people say we shouldn't exist… and yet here we are" I say, squeezing tighter.

This work has come to mean a lot of things for me. Reflecting light in its silica coating and meaning in its temporal form, my interpretation of this ceramic shard has transformed as my sense of self has shifted. Multiple descriptions of this work may have been re-written but one thing has always stuck; the title, Pride. 

Pride is considered dangerous by the gilded hands of the clergy. For without shame and guilt how could these custodians retain their power. In accepting one's full character and embracing ourselves we can retrieve this very power, long since sequestered by these traditionalists. 

Between a cappuccino, one sugar and a flat white I express this to my friend. 

"I've never felt more masculine than while sucking dick" I quip.

A laugh, a small inhalation of coffee and a cough emerge from the other side of the table. A punchline only hitting the mark both for its gratuitous shock value as well as its play with the presumptions engrained by a conservative society. To accept how you can appreciate yourself is what pride means. To not fall into pits of thoughts created by others but to find your own definitions of what fits you, that's what pride means. You do you, they used to say, well now I'm finally doing me. 

I am finally accepting and participating in the pansexual connections that I have held myself back from, I am finally disposing of that poisonous sewer of catholic guilt, I am finally detaching myself from those toxic presuppositions of masculinity. From the way I hold my head, to the playfulness I present myself, to the shit I no longer put up with, I can finally say I am proud of myself. 

Happy Madi Gras,

Your clay clad queer signing out,

Rory xx

 

La Niña (2022)

On the 12th of September 2022 the Bureau of Meteorology declared that Australia was heading towards it's 3rd consecutive La Niña event.

In coming months Eastern Australia would continue to see itself swept up in prolonged flooding.

With tens of thousands of homes flooded and dozens of lives lost,

low-lying communities continue to bear the brunt of human induced climate change

These recordings are an account of the events that lead to the wettest Victorian month on record

A record no one can say how long will last…

Video link via

Rory Young (@roryyoungartist) • Instagram photos and videos

Digging

 A labyrinth to tunnel, a pit to bore,

Caverns to devour and catacombs to explore,

Fine jewels and finer clays lay still in their tombs,

A prize just too ripe for the picking we leave a scenery acast in wound

Voids in the lands plunge towards prizes considered grand

Before us a constructed landscape we seek to command, 

Our structures are hands reaching towards that rubble,

Grabbing the shovel we cast our own problems into dirt born troubles,

Return to that gold seam glow,

For when we are consumed by the earth we will realise the heavens are below. 

Video accessible via... 

Rory Young on Instagram: “DIGGING  A labyrinth to tunnel, a pit to bore, Caverns to devour and catacombs to explore, Fine jewels and finer clays lay still in their…”

 Library Of Moments -tiled catalougue

Reflection of Instagram archive 

For a year I have delegated myself the task of collecting, editing and posting daily stories. During the 365 moments of digital release my brain has adjusted. Thinking through the frames and software that facilitates digital recording my perspective of the world has become forever shifted. Like clay tools next to my wheel the settings on my camera have become instruments for me to adjust the flavours of my artistic expression. A tool integrated into one's practice is reflected not by the settings of the recording device but by the change of how the artist imagines they can capture the world. A telephoto lens may flatten the landscape drawing parallels in the audience's eye, while a well timed pan can change the tone like Tchaikovsky setting off a cannon in the orchestra pit. All these are tools that can afford new visions to the creator.

Tools will change the qualities within an artwork. The artist, by virtue of using those very tools will in turn change the qualities of their own psyche. After a year of dedicated practice I look at my surrounding environment differently. My eyes don't just see colour and light but stories and motifs, all laid bare and all ripe for the recording!

For a year I have pushed myself to create a catalogue of footage, as of today it's three and a half thousand videos in size. As I sit I am swamped in by this backlog of recordings. Inaccessible information is exactly that; inaccessible. It's only through sequencing and archiving that a library comes to life. I need to stop, collect, archive and edit beyond the 365 snack-size pieces I have already produced. That's why I am stopping my daily stories so I can spend the time necessary to work out my own dewey decimal system for the behemoth of data saved to my hard drives. 

Whether it's the silica crystals in the clay I throw or the silica chips that record my footage my eyes will forever look to what can be captured in my artistic expression. I do not know what the next 365 days will bring to my practice, only that I know I will have more instruments and ideas at my disposal than I have today.