wild river

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 English sycamore inspired by wild Alaskan rivers.

This low table is made from a rippling and wild-grained piece of English Sycamore which reminded me of the untamed, braided rivers of Alaska.When I had come back from a trip to Alaska I tried to paint these wonderful rivers as seen from the air.  They carry the melt water from the mountain glaciers down to the sea, and the silt creates transient islands in the flow and shows up all the currents and wave patterns.

My watercolours were of limited success, but this piece of sycamore had done all the work for me.  My only job was to give the table a sense of flow and riverishness.  I like the way that the end view imitates the shape of the river bed while adding refinement to the table edges.

contemporary coffee table by Grant Sonnex - furniture designer and maker

contemporary coffee table by Grant Sonnex - furniture designer and maker

contemporary coffe table by Grant Sonnex - furniture designer and maker  contemporary coffe table by Grant Sonnex - furniture designer and maker

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