SM 106
 

Immersion
 

Image:

Transitional objects series 2

Bisque fired stoneware, 2005.

Throwing clay, the wheel spinning, centring the material as you the individual are centred.  Pull the clay upwards as though it were still; completely immobile but impossibly plastic, like the imagination.  Clay rises between the fingers like a plant from the ground, centred, centring.  When the harmony of centring and rising occurs your body also centres and rises in the clay.  When it is not, not only the clay is a fragmented mess.  Disintegration of the ego. Stress.  I have to pull this together.

Driving along Portsmouth Drive, the water front - perhaps I should go for a walk around the harbour, or walk along the beach.  In the sunshine.  Take some time off, have a break.  But no, I don't want to be flattened out as a plane, like the water reflecting the sky; like a wet, collapsed form outstretched palms upwards, vulnerable and receptive, open and waiting. I don’t want to imitate a picture plane where upright perspective forcibly folds the planar view of water and hills, a collapsed and crumpled wall of thin wet clay contorted into an upright sheet and pressed flat and hard for ever against a wall.  A surface that is merely visual, reflective, untouchable.  I don't want that.  I want plasticity and focus, and the dark channel through that hollow form, concentrating the self like an augur piercing the earth, as the finger pierces the centred clay.

The self, centred in gravity; concentrated forces of the earth.  Self, clay and earth as one.