Sunday 1 February 2009

Slow cloth and practical pottery

"...and here we are, back with the gods,
whose thunder and whose thunderous tones
dwell in the plasticity of our clay"

I found this quotation scribbled in one of my clay notebooks but with no attribution.

A search came up with a book by Mary Caroline Richards called
"The Crossing Point - selected talks and writings".

Richards was a potter during the 1960's, she relates creating pottery to personal development. She speaks of 'a hunger deep in people all over the planet for coming into relationship with each other'....and isn't that just what we are all doing here as we visit each other's work.

This 'crossing point' she says is like the image of centering clay on the potter's wheel, we work the body of clay as we work the body of our mind, we make a big vessel of living water that we all need to drink, and we all need to help to make so that it will be big enough to hold us all.

In the chapter called 'Occupational Therapy' she connects clay and song "the inner ear and the moving hand"

She found that the German word for Sound is ton which means both tone and clay, and the common quality of tone and clay is their stretch, their plasticity.

Their ancient root is TA: to stretch. We hear it not only in tone, but in tendon, tension. The Latin word 'tono' means to resound, and 'tonens' is thunder, the thunderer, the thunderer God Jupiter - and here we are, back with the Gods!
Isn't that an interesting connection!

This was a fascinating book which I am still reading, you have to love the 'innernetz' without it this would have remained a nameless quotation.

And on to my slow cloth, which has me so obsessed it is not slow but progressing very quickly.
I cut a pattern from freezer paper which is supposed to represent the heat flowing around a kiln.

low fired stitchery project

low fired stitchery project

Using a piece of the fabric that I had dyed with rust and iron oxide, I ironed the paper to it then outlined the edges with a Shiva paintstik, This was worked into the fabric with an old toothbrush then ironed to set the paint.

low fired stitchery project

After the colour has set, the freezer paper is peeled off. It can be used again.

low fired stitchery project

low fired stitchery project

Now on with some stitching.

2 comments:

Paula Hewitt said...

this freezer paper stencil is a great technique -ive used it beofre - i like your idea of working in the paint with the toothbrush. did you wait for the paintstik to dry before you ironed it?

Erica said...

Hi Paula,
I'm much to impatient to wait for things to dry, I'd actually forgotten that I was supposed to let it dry (48 hours they recommend) a little came off on the greaseproof paper I used under the iron but apart from that it seemed to set OK

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