Saturday, May 17, 2008

did it just get incredibly full of rage in here, or is it just me?

here they are, en masse. the bane of my existence for the past semester. the reason that i wore my embarrassing pink running shorts in public too many times to count, and that the automatic answer to "what are you doing today?" was inevitably followed by a dramatic sigh of defeat instead of an actual response essentially every weekend. in case i haven't made it abundantly clear (perhaps with the number of times that i uttered "fuck ceramics" at a remarkably high volume, often in the ceramics studio, always met with dirty glares from the students that actually like smushing clay into deeply conceptual vessels), me and ceramics did not so much see eye to eye. i'm glad i learned to throw, but beyond now being able to generate a sweet tableware set should i ever feel decidedly masochistic, i do not feel at all compelled to ever enter a ceramics studio again. that being said, here's what came of my toil.

first up is my final, a tea set with tea leaf fortunes actually sculpturally slipped into the cups. i read up on how to read tea leaves, bought loose black tea and a practice teacup with optimum leaf-reading capabilities, drank, swirled, read, and documented the fortunes, then recreated them. but part of the fun is that where one person sees a grasshopper, another sees a whale. so it's all a little ambiguous. which you would never expect from fortune-telling, obviously.

this is my "historical vessel combined with modern mass produced vessel addressing a pressing current issue" vessel. yeah. did i mention how much i love ceramics? it's about this article i read (on digg, because man, i'm just that classy with my research) about how if you took all the water on the planet (oceans, ice caps, moisture in the atmosphere, etc.) and compared it to the actual earth, it would be like comparing a marble (water) to a grapefruit (planet). global warming is hilarious, is the moral of that story. anyway, so this thing is giant-ish, like 16 inches tall, 13 wide and about 8 or 9 deep at its fattest point.

and the bowls. they... are bowls. deeply, deeply conceptual bowls. that's about the it. never again, is all i can say about that.




1 comment:

Ellen Kling said...

i'm sorry you kinda-sorta hated ceramics. at least you came away with some super interesting pieces!

I love the concept (and execution) of the white tea-leaf set.