hang a landscape on your wall

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. 

I want to make a collection of cabinets that hang on the wall like beautiful landscape paintings, whose interiors take you inside the landscape, and that everyone can see because it will go on a tour of public galleries around Britain. Well, thanks to the Arts Council of Wales, that dream is getting significantly closer to reality.ACW_logo_CMYK_landscape_600

 

This collection, called land, sea and light, will use fine, handmade cabinets as a sort of tactile sculpture to explore the shapes and qualities of the dramatic Pembrokeshire coast.  I’ll use layers of wood to create abstract landscape reliefs on the doors, and the interiors will develop that imagery so that as you enter the cabinet, you enter the landscape.

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I want to go way beyond a literal wooden image of the landscape and use the qualities of the wood as a visual medium to explore the form, energy, movement and space of the place.  What is it about this landscape that makes so many of us fall in love with it?  Rather than answer that with words I want to answer it in form and image.

 

My furniture deigning mentor, David Savage, said, “ if you can explain the issue in words it ain’t much good as an image….which is why so many good artists just shut about what they do.”  So I’ll take the hint and try to keep the images coming on this blog so that you can follow the progress if it interests you.

 

At the moment the Arts Council of Wales is funding stage one of the project (bless them!), and David Randell, director of the Waterfront Gallery in Milford Haven, has agreed to put on the exhibition in early 2015 before it tours (bless him too!)  So I’m out on the cliffs when the weather is kind to look and absorb and back at the studio when it’s wet and wild to turn the drawings into designs, and right now, the sun is out!

 

Follow the progress of the landscape cabinets on Grant’s furniture making blog

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