cliff top to vacuum press in a day

It was the coldest, bleakest part of this last winter. That was when my right arm was gripped with such intense pain that I had to stop working with the clay. I was not happy! The medical advice was to take a break for a month, but what was I going to do?  It turned out that this was an opportunity to completely rethink my making process. 

All my forms up to this point had been made by honing them into shape using a metal scraper held in my right hand, and it was the tension in doing that that had led to the pain. I loved that process, and I felt that the gradual refinement of the firms over many days was part of what people perceived in them. I thought that, in some way, it was the source of their calmness and what they communicated. So to be deprived of access to that process was a challenge to what I had come to believe the work was about.

But my commitment is not to the outcome of the making process, it is to the process itself – to try to find a rightness in the making process and see what that quality leads to in the finished pieces. Clearly the scraping that I enjoyed was not right for my arm, so could there be a new way of making that would involve less tension and more balance in my body? 

For some reason I had also been reflecting on my early days of recording wildlife sounds which eventually led to my first career in natural history radio. Thinking back to the child who stuck a microphone out of his bedroom window to record the garden bird song I realised how long I have had a fascination with recording the natural world in one way or another. I was thinking how clay also keeps a record of everything that happens to it until it is fired, at which point the story of its making is locked into its form and surface. Maybe thinking of the clay as a recording medium could lead to a new way of working.  And so it did. 

IMG_4865_600A few year ago I wrote a blog post asking whether it was possible to retain the energy of a sketch in a piece of furniture.  Today may have been a step towards that.

This morning I was on the far side of our little mountain, Carn Llidi, looking down into a cove with the most dramatic rock formations.

IMG_4856_600I hadn’t been able to settle into sorting my recent paint finish challenges, so I took my skecth book, my dog and set off.  By late lunch time I had a handfull of sketches from the cliff top and the design for a landscape cabinet in mind.

IMG_4857_600One (too many) cups of coffee later, the sketch was developed into a design and the I was cutting the pieces on the bandsaw.

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IMG_4865_600By home-time the first components were glued up and in the vacuum press.

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Hopefully the speed of the process, the immediacy of idea to action, will keep the energy of the sketch and the energy of the rocks themselves.

Now I’m looking back at Carn Llidi as the sun goes down.  This is what life is supposed to be like 🙂

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