arty face grace
The Foolish Builder (2024)
Clay, slip, tin white glossy glaze, concrete, wooden boards, prints on paper, wheat paste.
114 x 98 (bike stand)
122 x 200 (wall)
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I made a chair out of ceramics, looking at ideas of care, labour and trust, and the lack of it, when you rely on something that is fragile. I wanted to choose a new object that could be transformed or translated into ceramics in order to challenge both the medium and the object. I chose a bike stand because it represents security and having that taken away, it loses its function, so you are entirely focused on its form.
The ceramic bike stand sits within the context of the Bible. The particular passage being Matthew 7 v 24 - 27, in which Jesus speaks on different areas of life, subverting traditional societal ideas. If you don’t build your life on His words then you are building your life on something that is fragile, if you do build your life on his words, you have strong foundations. This bike stand is a representation of that parable, in a simple aesthetic form.
In order to make the bike-stand I had to scale up the original one I had chosen to replicate, to account for shrinkage rates in the clay. I traced the bike-stand using a specifically sized board, getting one of my course-mates to hold it up against the stand outside, as I traced around it with a pencil. It was as if I was drawing around my hand as a ve year old child. e boundary of three dimensions to two dimensions was blurred, in order to create a replica of this three dimensional object, a two dimensional drawing was necessary. ere was this going back and forth between flatness and a solidity. is process introduced the concept of scale into my work in a way that was important in seeing how you can enlarge something to then shrink it again and so on.
I focused on the colour of the bike stand rather than the form at first. This preparation involved measuring out oxides to figure out what kind of effect I wanted on the final bike stand, as glazing wasn’t really an option due to it sticking to the base of the kiln. Covering the clay pipes in slip, I ended up with slip covering the board. Trying to wipe the slip away, it led to a drawing of the bike stand, mimicking the line and form of it. I like the translucence of the slip on the board, and the way that it highlights the contours within the fibres and the lines of it. Having this scientific method, and the unpredictable result of ceramics, glaze and slip and not really knowing what will come of it, especially at my level, creates this boundary of knowledge and ignorance, preparedness and unpreparedness, certainty and uncertainty, as seen in the Bible passage.
