Hi everyone, this is my first blog, and I would never had considered doing this except I'm going to graduate from Bath Spa University with a degree in '3D Design: Ceramics BA(Hons)', and this is one of the tools for self-promotion that's been suggested to us( me and my classmates). Having seen a few artist blogs, I have to agree, I'm just not the extrovert type. I never even had a facebook account until a few months ago, when I thought it might be a good idea to try it out knowing I would have to start one of these (a blog) in the near future(now). It was my way of testing the water I guess, as from my start with the internet over 10years ago, I have always been very security concious and have never ever used my real name online.... till now and I'm still not using it, well, an abbreviation of my name and how I mark/sign my work.
Well, the purpose of my blog is to promote my work, so here goes.....
This is my final year, my degree show is in only about 10 weeks away, the pressure is on and I'm still developing my body of work. The inspiration for this work is wind turbines. Have you ever seen the Australian movie 'The Castle'? Well, one of the main protagonists is Darryl Kerrigan, a true optimist. When he looks at the electricity pylons marching across the airfield over his back fence he doesn't see an eyesore, he sees progress, they remind him of 'Man's ability to generate electricity'. Well, wind turbines remind me of man's ability to generate clean(er) electricity. They are also an inescapable part of our landscape now. Regardless of how hard some will fight against them, they are here to stay. I'm not a NIMBY, and if I lived in the right area for them, I would lay down the red carpet and beg to be allowed to help put them up. But, I live at the bottom of a basin in Bath (Somerset, UK), and I rent.
How do wind turbines influence my work? Well, initially, I wanted to build working turbines from found objects, but it didn't happen that way, partly because of lack of funds and the right stuff didn't come my way, but also, I sort of let it happen, I had my dissertation, my hubby was working away from home during the week and didn't want to drive me anywhere on the weekends, and I didn't try hard enough to make it happen. In the end I had the artist's version of writer's block in regards to that aspect of the project. In a way, I'm sort of glad of that as I don't think my project would have ended up taking the direction it has. As while I was suffering this block, I was throwing. I've learned that if I struggle with a task, working on a different project helps me solve the problems with the first project. What I kept going back to was the turning motion. And the turbulence the blades cause, regardless of the design.
Well, it all worked itself out after a workshop with Tanya Gomez and then a chance to do Simon Hulbert's workshop again a couple weeks later. So now I'm using the Japanese technique Tanya showed us to throw big(like half a bag of clay or more), combined with Simon's exploration of non-conventional throwing to make these...
This pic was taken moments after I took it out of a reduction kiln the piece was still warm enough I needed gloves to handle it. No two are the same, and some have taken a vessel type form which is leading me to a potentially satisfactory resolution for my functional ware, I just have to hop onto the CAD pcs at Uni to fine tune. But also this has taken a 2nd direction which has possibilities, but I'm not going to mention any further details until I have some prototypes.
So, this was my first posting on my first blog, and one of my first steps in self-promotion. I just hope it all goes well.
