This piece is still in progress and is an attempt to combine buon fresco with my poetic forms, however I am rethinking these techniques and testing the ability to apply fresco to the stippling or instead subtle additives of watercolor to give these sculptures moments and areas that react to their shape and their change in shape. Other times I value the purity of the porcelain surface and it’s ability to communicate the preciousness and vulnerability that I find when making them. I've written before about my discovery of Ekphrastic Poetry, which is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting a painting or sculpture, a poet may expand its meaning. I am making work in contrast to this method, where phrases, poems, or words act as a prompt for my forms and my making. The meticulous and repetitive act of stippling the surface allows me to draw with surface and emphasize form. It as well imitates the extreme attentiveness that I provide to my buon fresco paintings. It’s a meditative process for myself as an artist as well and in a sense it is this passionate obsessive act that I hope gives them a stronger body of language. Kaveh Akbar once stated that "the process of discovery in poetry is so tactile that poetry is never just purely about language….that there is motion and function within it.” Upon reading this I felt a form of encouragement in how I was working. I hope to develop a way of creating poetry through my hands, touch, form, and surface…..and most importantly through process. I am continuing my body of work where I am applying buon fresco to ceramic surfaces. Clay is tangible. It provides me the opportunity to mold, stretch, and transform. Buon Fresco is tedious and time sensitive, and requires attentiveness. I love this marriage of poetic ideas with sensuous, tactile materials; and I enjoy the challenges in their resistance and their fragility.
I have this impulse to create a connection and a relationship through my work. To create these poems or narratives on and through their surface – within these permanent and vulnerable objects, in the same sense that our bodies are. To project “humanness” in them. I am also creating a body of work that is small and intimate, some singular and some as multiples and narratives. I enjoy thinking of them as an object of “preciousness." I find sentiment and nostalgia in the personal and hand held. There’s a feeling of tenderness and affection for these objects that move beyond their intended purpose into a representation of something more or long since passed. |
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