Swamp Cartography at Noosa

To foot or not to foot?

Turning a piece of pottery upside down and seeing a neat, formal foot enclosing the potter's mark , combines the pleasures of handling the shape and weight of an object with the gentle thrill of seeing a familiar potter's mark or, finding an unknown maker has left a clue, at the very bottom of the pot, a secret, intimate sign linking the maker and the user. The foot is an essential part of this pleasure as it contains the final piece of direct communication between the artist and the user of a pot.

When I was down at the ANU last week Micheal Keighry and I had a talk about form. I've been wrestling with the idea of footed or unfooted forms for some time. The footed forms place a pot firmly in a tradition creating a tension with the drawing which is abstract and contemporary. The small forms really work with a foot. As the pots get larger the foot stops raising the pot from the surface on which it sits in a dynamic way and starts drawing the eye towards itself in a a self-conscious near parody of traditional Japanese shapes. Why is this?








There is something I really love about footed bowls.  It is a potter's thing.  The foot on a thrown bowl talks about process and tradition.  There is a need for thrown bowls to be footed when they are decorated raw.  It is very difficult to turn unfooted bowls over in order to decorate near the bottom edge of the vessel.  A foot provides something for the potter to grab onto.  I also love how the foot adds an alert, exclaiming posture to the pot.  I feel that throwers are often asked to erase marks of making such as throwing lines, turning lines, feet.  The wheel is a humble, industrial machine from the lower echelons of the industrial spectrum, often signs of the craft of throwing are seen as a distraction or something inadvertent and ugly that should be erased.  For me the turned foot is a celebration of the thrower's skill, anyone who has ever thrown pots on a wheel knows the pleasure of a fine turned foot, it is a piece of communication between me and other throwers, an affirmation of my love for an underrated craft yet to fulfill it's creative potential.

Half moon vessels

Throwing large forms with half moon shape. The vessels are embedded with bushcombings in the throwing.
Bush combings are soaked in iron oxide and yellow glaze stain and thrown onto the pot after it has been pulled up twice.

*The half moons slumped during firing and are sitting very heavily on their bottoms. I like a pot that rises from the table. Analyzing Lucie Rie's shapes, her pots come off the table on a slight soft foot with a strong impulse upwards before bellying out.

birds

Rainbow lorikeet feathers from Tin Can Bay

Galah feathers

A Brown Cuckoo Dove that killed itself flying into a window.

refining throwing technique

Feathers, Collection, Maps.

 

I'm reading about the transfer of visual information.  The effective change in representation form perspective to "flatland".  Information can be conveyed on a single map using both designs.  Delineation using boxes or enclosed lines activates white space with in the enclosure.  In"Envisioning Information"  Edward R Tufte analyses graphical representation and the tools of the two dimensional such as colour, line, composition etc that have been use throughout history to render information conveyed through graphs, and maps.  Tufte's analysis contains both science and poetry as he considers the elements most effective in conveying information.  In calling the drawing that I make on the pots "maps" I too am trying to convey information.   The "data" I collect are bushcombings, photographs and impressions and the point I try to convey through the maps is a two dimensional rendering of the sights, sounds and detail of a specific environment.  Combining abstract and representational images and marks, using composition to order the data renders an impression of the wallum  both informative and lyrical.   In his conclusion Tufte says

"....(This) frustration reflects the essential dilemma of narrative designs- how to reduce the magnificent four dimensional reality f time and three space into little marks on paper flatlands.  Perhaps one day  high resolution computer visualizations, which combine slightly abstracted representations along with a dynamic and animated flatland will lighten the laborious complexity of encodings- and yet still capture some worthwhile part of the subtlety  of the human itinerary."

(pp119, Envisioning Information, Edward R Tufte, 1990, Graphics Press , Connecticut.)

Japanese brushes

Japanese calligraphy brushes. The quality of line obtained by these brushes is beautiful, very clear and the bristles hold the water without letting it all soak into the surface as soon as they touch the clay.

Terra Sig Mutant

The sugary terra sig glaze experiment can't just sit in the studio going hard. I've given it a new job and things are working out really well. The scraffitti leptospermums used to work in a loose variant of mishima with pure terra sig, but with the sugary glaze/terra mutant the line seems cleaner. I think it is because of the addition of the clear glaze, the pigment is gathered up when the glaze melts and settles into the scraffitto line. this enhances the clarity and scratchy qualities of the lines and the slight shine the glaze gives the inlay attracts the eye making the drawing stronger and more coherent.