water table

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. 

 

 a coffee table in glass and  elm

Water Table1_600

inspired by a still pool between boulders at low tide on Caerfai beach, St Davids, Pembrokeshire

Water Table5_600

I’ve shaped the surface to accentuate the fluid figuring and echo the shapes of stones, pebbles and ripples in the sand.

Water Table2_600

And the elm has such a range of natural of colours, from near reds to greens, that I decided to leave it untreated.

Water Table4_600

Actually  the decision was made for me one evening when I was in St Davids Cathedral. I was looking at the carving of a knight on the surface of a very old stone tomb where the high points of the face and body had been burnished to a shine by thousands of hands over hundreds of years. And I thought how wonderful it would be for the wooden surfaces of the table to be transformed by stroking hands over the years.

Water Table3_600

So this is a table to be stroked and stared into with that beautiful beach and its boulders in mind.

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