it’s near impossible to clean away the excess without staining. I do my best. some of the the tile gaps I’ve filled with newman clay and barnard clay instead of tile grout. they all crack as they dry
I try to repair the cracks by pouring a layer of clay slip over the entire surface. something you are taught never to do in ceramics:
if a large crack appears, you should always wedge the entire form back into plastic clay and start again from scratch
if you smooth it over, it will likely reappear again once water escapes from the body
these clay bodies, taken from the earth, contain large amounts of minerals that can give them potent staining strength.
one of the most common naturally occurring mineral in clays – iron oxide – can give bodies a rich red, black or yellow colour
in ceramic handbooks, this quality is often written about like an inconvenience: “newman clay is useful for imparting a bright orange red tone but can be difficult to work with as it stains whatever surface it comes into contact with”
I find that I am drawn to this. I like that these bodies resist the desire to keep things clean and contained. wherever they touch, they leave an echo of the earth. as long as they contain moisture
wedged with my knees and hands, as I soon tired
somewhere between wedging, coiling and joining, I practice movements that can never become a vessel
application of 洛神花 & 熟地 medicine pigment onto dried clay slip (on one tray slip dries on wood, on the other slip dries on stretched cotton), one stroke from left to right even when the brush becomes dry
in chinese painting, 留白 (leaving empty / leaving space) is an essential philosophy and visual element
the pigment fades as it dries. moisture evaporates and is absorbed by the dried clay slip
I poured another layer of slip over the dried medicine pigments
both trays dried in less than two hours in the afternoon sun
I tried to pour the slip as even as I could, but clay’s viscosity can change quickly. the slip thickened as I poured
I want to study these cracks, I’m so mesmerized by them, so I trace them over with pigment made from 熟地
I started practicing calligraphy again, so I do my best to remember 起笔, 行笔, 顿笔, 收笔 as I study the lines
patterns emerge as the clay slip dries even though I try to coat the surface as evenly as I can
dried slip is surprisingly pliable, wavering like ribbons even I mist the entire surface with water again
but as pliable as it seems, it cannot be picked up or kept
I decide to flatten it instead
when it’s dry, the formations can be easily scrapped off with a spatula and returned to it’s dry state. this one is called B3
if I add water to this, mix well, pour it out onto a tray again, it dries over time and creates another formation
all store bought clays and dried clay ingredients have been created through process of erosion and compression over hundreds of thousands of years. clay particles are very fine and light, so they often travel long distances in the wind or carried by rivers, and only settle when the air or water is still.
over these long distances and stretches of time, their mineral structure slowly changes and they acquire material properties like their plasticity, which enable clay to be formed very thin and curved without breaking
landscape dried within two hours in the bright afternoon sun
ghosts of the previous layer floating on a new layer of clay
porcelain, recycled clay pinch pots in plastic, leather-hard & bone dry states filled repeatedly with traditional chinese medicine until the vessels fragment
We are so often pressed for time. We spend time, buy time, save time, but rarely do we experience time. In this performance, I inhabited 40 hours by attending to candle flames and pigments made from traditional Chinese herbal medicine.
What does it mean when we observe speed or altitude changing the pace of time? How can different outcomes in time both exist in a “superposition”, or even more bafflingly, cause reality to split off into different worlds? Beyond the artificial, oversimplified construct of hours and minutes, the nature of time, which resides in all living and non-living things, is incredibly difficult to understand. For this reason, I have been drawing.
I use thin cotton cords coated with wax to draw. The balance of flexibility and structure lets me draw the line in almost any direction in space. When I’m satisfied with the drawings, I coat it in layer upon layer of wax until it becomes a candle. Neither the wax nor the wick is truly my drawing medium though. The only basic law of physics that distinguishes the past from the future is: if nothing else around it changes, heat cannot pass from a cold body to a hot one. What I am drawing with is the arrow of time – heat and the potentiality for heat.
In Andy Goldsworthy’s Storm King Wall, he draws a line that extends from the highway into the river, then emerges from the water and winds through the woods with a stonewall. In Rivers and Tides, Goldsworthy says of this work, “A wall is the line that is in sympathy with the place through which it travels, and that sense of movement is very important to understanding the sculpture. All the movement and passage of people, the movement of the wall, of the stones as they run around the trees, the river of growth that is the forest. And it has made me aware of that flow around the world, the veins around the world.”
Like Goldsworthy, my drawings help me to see what surrounds us but is perhaps invisible to the everyday glance. I am not worried about the exact shape of the lines I draw, because if time is both relative to where we are and constantly splitting into different worlds, then it stands to reason that it exists in every shape, whether we are aware of them or not. I meditate on a memory of mine – important but faded, embedded underneath time – as I draw. I find that the lines I make nearer to the memory are more circular and enclosed, multiple loops leading to the same direction; those that are further away from the memory are more open, gentle bends leading to wildly shifting directions.
In Tim Ingold’s book, he writes about John Ruskin’s leading lines :
“.. lines that embody in their very formation the past history, present action and future potential of a thing. The lines of the mountain show how it has been built up and worn away, those of the tree show how it has contended with the trials of life in the forest and with the winds that have tormented it…”
The lines that I’m finding with candles wicks attempt to show not the history, present and future of a mountain or tree, but that of a memory. From the temporal location of the memory, I turn around and notice that the numerous lines of possibilities in the distance have become much fewer and more enclosed, as I get close to the moment that has already transpired.
When I install my candle drawings on the walls, they cast shadows that look like letters of a language. In Ingold’s text, he asks, at what stage does a child cease to draw letters and begin instead to write? Referencing the work of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, Ingold quotes:
“There is a critical moment, however, at which the child discovers that the mark he has made on paper is a depiction of something, and moreover that this thing bears a name. Thenceforth the naming of the object can precede rather than follow the act of drawing it… But he is still not writing it. Writing calls for one further shift, prompted by the discovery that letters can be arranged in meaningful combinations to form words… Only when he can read can he also be truly said to write.”
Like the child who first draws and then discovers the name of what he has made, I have to first draw before I recognise in them the lines of tree rings, water ripples, gnarly branches, before I discover in them the movement of time. In Ingold’s terms, my candle drawings and the shadows that they cast are notations – notations with multiple but certainly not arbitrary meanings and associations. Despite the visual similarities to calligraphic strokes or alphabets, perhaps my drawings cannot become writings because I cannot read them with certainty.
But by Vygotsky’s definition, I also refuse to let my drawings become writing. In the West, alphabets are used as a tools for communicating ideas in written form. Therefore, it is not possible to write what we do not yet know. Towards the end of the Rivers and Tides, Goldsworthy expresses that it is often difficult for him to talk about his work because his drawings, made from natural materials, create for him a world beyond what words can define. But Goldsworthy’s recurring lines in nature already form a language. I want to propose that we can write what we do not yet know by letting our drawings discover their own layers of notation.
