coincidence – pierced forms

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. 

Kevin Woolgar carved ring Matt Sherratt caramic form Spring 1966 by Dame Barbara Hepworth 1903-1975

Isn’t the web a feast of coincidence.  A ring carved from bamboo by Kevin Woolgar @kevinwoolgar, a photographer in Puerto Rico, and a ceramic sculpture by Matt Sherratt @sculpturalforms working in North Wales arrived via email and the Maker in Wales facebook page today.

The hole in the ring is of course practical, the hole in the scuplture is inspired by what Matt sees in the natural world. They reminded me of Barbara Hepworth, whose work I love, and who was exploring such forms in the mid 20th Century.  This bronze from 1966 is entitled, Spring.  What is it that is so compelling about these pierced forms? I must start playing with them myself.

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