In Situ

Well it's about that time of year again for my yearly blogpost, although one of my New Year resolutions (AGAIN!) is to try to keep this blog more up-to-date.  Maybe this year I will actually succeed ;)

Anyway it has been a busy year in the Tinderbox!  Firstly, I was very excited to be able to join a new artist's collective based in Cork called Over The Line Studios.  It is really the first studio in Cork which actually provides for ceramicists, and we have access to a range of kilns and individual spaces large enough to cope with the general chaos which seems to be generated by anyone who works with clay.

As well as ceramics we also have a mix of artists working with various media such as painting, photography, textiles and sculpture, which is great for learning new skills and bouncing ideas.

The studios are situated over a kitchen showroom where beautiful high-spec kitchens are on display.  For our opening group show it was decided we would be showing our pieces inside the kitchens, which took a while for some of us to get our heads around.  What...no white walls?  No PLINTHS???  How is our stuff going to work in a room full of shiny marble and MIRRORS?? However, once we had freed ourselves from our mental straight jackets we could see how exciting and different the possibilities were.

It was entitled In Situ, as the work was, obviously, being shown in situ, and bar the odd crash and heart-breaking smash it was a roaring success, and firmly put OverTheLineStudios on the Cork art scene.  There was lots of wine, there was music, there was dancing and it was great to discover how well we could all pull together as a team when it mattered.

Anyhoo, here are some pics of the work on display.  If any of you are ever in Cork and fancy popping in to the studios to say hi, please do! ;)

Driftwood Disc:  Saggar-Fired Stoneware, Found Chain, Driftwood

Beach Stones:  Saggar-Fired Stoneware.  Photography by Dervla Baker.

Beach Stones:  Saggar-Fired Stoneware.  Photography by Dervla Baker.

Escapades of Chickens:  Saggar-Fired Stoneware, Found Toolbox, Found tools.
We found this old toolbox our rambling one day and it took a couple of years of subconscious festering before I finally decided what to do with it. Basically a chicken escaped and laid it's eggs in a tool box.  I got the idea from a painting hanging in the Crawford Art Gallery of a basketful of eggs.  Not sure who painted it, nor am I sure how my mind managed to make a connection to the toolbox but hey ho that is what happened and here are the results ;)

By The Sea:  Black and White Stoneware, Found Chain, Driftwood.
The black ceramic beach stones with white stripes in this piece were inspired by the beautiful stones on one of my favourite beaches here in Cork.  Obsidian?  Quartz?  Geology is not my strong point but I would like to find our more ;)

Dragon Eggs and Mordor:  Saggar and Sawdust-Fired Stoneware

Black Dog: Saggar-Fired Stoneware

Beyond The Ha-Ha

Cor well I can't believe I haven't been near this blog for almost a year.  So much has happened!  Since I finished college I have been pretty busy trying to learn how to be a proper artist ha.  I was awarded a three month graduate residency in the National Sculpture Factory here in Cork, which was really exciting.  I have just finished my stint there and am currently showing work in a group show called Beyond the Ha-Ha, so I thought I would share a little bit of my new work with you.

We had a wild winter, so the beaches were awash with all sorts of rubbish.  This was good news for a bin-raking beachcomber like me, so I filled my poor groaning car with sackfuls of crap and loads of interesting driftwood and hauled it all home to Tinderbox HQ, i.e our shed ;)

My good friend Amy and I spent about a week making loads of plaster moulds of beach stones so that I could make a whole heap of ceramic stones.  Some of them I saggar-fired, and some were made of terracotta and sawdust-fired, and I also discovered black porcelain for the first time which is gorgeous stuff to work with. I had fun trying to balance the stones of top of one another in  different formations;

One of my favourite finds was a stove top which was all rusted.  I fell in love with the shape of it and would have been quite happy to just show it on its own as I think it is beautiful, however it was further enhanced by the addition of some of the black and red stones:

One glorious evening I decided to take some of the new stuff down to the beach and do a photoshoot.  The light was wonderful and luckily I managed to get loads of pictures just before the tide came in oof that would have been a disaster ha ;)

I also wanted to get some driftwood in there, so I made a saggar-fired hanging piece with a particularly lovely flat piece:

Anyway the show is running until the 4th of May in the Wandesford Quay Gallery, so if any of you are around Cork please do pop in. There are also more ceramics on display, as well as paintings and sculpture.  In the meantime I shall be keeping busy with my first solo show in October (eek!) and trying to keep a lid on the panic ;) Your comments are, as always, most welcome ;)

Axeheads and Driftwood

Cor well I am limping to the end of this year...only one and a half weeks to go before assessments and I still have quite a few sculptures to make when the pieces come out of the kiln eek!  Still, I am really going to miss this college as it has been an amazing time, and I just hope I can find a way to keep making after I finish.

I thought I would share some of the pieces which will be going into the final exhibition ( I hope!)  There is still more to come but these are a few that are actually finished ahem...;)

I became somewhat fascinated by axeheads last term.  There is something lovely about their swooping shapes and once saggar-fired they look lovely with the silver birch.

This term took me on a hunt for more seasoned wood and I ended up on the beach hunting for driftwood.  I found some lovely pieces of wood and an old washed up frame, so I decided to try and do something with them.

A friend of mine also hauled these two pieces off the beach for me...they are massive and were very wet and soft, but I have scooped them out and dried them off and sanded them, so hopefully will be able to use them for something ;)

All the plastic I found on the beach will be made into wall pieces with the ceramic discs, and I have made hanging discs with ceramic versions of the plastic to highlight their colours.

And I made a couple more with some driftwood and shells...

And a dish, for good measure ;)

Anyhoo, hopefully it will all come together in the end and not look like a complete dog's dinner...there could well be more culling to come before the final cut, but I've enjoyed the journey I've been on this year and there are elements of the work here which I would like to expand upon in the future.

If any of you are in Cork and would be interested in coming to the exhibition, feel free, as it is free and there will also be free booze available ;) It is on the 7th June in the Crawford College of Art, and more information can be found here...

http://www.crawfordexhibitions.com/liminal2013/index.html

It'll be great craic ;)

Standing Stones

I was born on an island called Arran on the West Coast of Scotland, which is a completely wild place, with nothing much there apart from sea, mountains, deer and sheep. And seals, of course.  Love seals ;)

There is a place called King's Caves on the North side of the island, which is a group of caves hidden along the shoreline.  It's where Robert the Bruce is said to have met the spider, although there are lots of caves in Scotland where he is said to have met the spider.  Maybe he just met a lot of spiders.  Anyway, there is certainly enough room to hide a few horses in these caves.  Inside the caves, mixed in with all the graffiti, are some actual ancient cave paintings which you can see if you bring a torch, which is quite exciting.  What I really love about this place, however, is that some local guy comes down and builds these stone towers all over the shoreline outside the caves (probably, admittedly, because there's not much else to do...)

Arran is a great mecca for geologists, and there are all types of rocks here, from great sculptural sea-whipped sandstone formations to hard granite.

Arran is also littered with Pagan worshipping sites, with fairy dells and standing stones all over the place.  The most famous of these are the great standing stones on Machrie Moor, which are located in a great bleak valley surrounded by mountains.  Depending on the weather and the time of day, they can either feel extremely foreboding and ominous or really sun-warmed and friendly, but it is always apparent how ancient they are, and I have long been fascinated by them.

(source)

(source)

Ireland, of course, has lots of standing stones too, and here in Cork we have the Ogham Stones, which are housed in the University College Cork. Stones like these were found all over the coast line of Ireland, as well as in Scotland, Wales and Cornwall.  The Irish ones were inscribed in ancient primitive Irish, usually with people's names and the tribes they belonged to.  They are kind of like an ancient form of Who's Who. 

(source)

I started making my own ceramic versions of standing stones, scored and textured like the Ogham stones and vertically jagged like the Arran ones.  I cut them into pieces and fired the pieces separately, then reassembled them so they were not all one colour.  They were saggar-fired in a raku kiln and mounted on slate.

I'm hoping they give off a bit of the brooding presence of the Machrie Moor standing stones. Spooky...;)