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Barnacles

I suppose that, given when I am not thinking about ceramics, I tend to think a lot about sharp things on rocks which might damage me or my boat, Annika, my nights have been spent dreaming about barnacles this week.  This got me wondering about why any creature would chose to live in the kinds of inhospitable places that barnacles live.  Who would chose to spend their entire adult life fixed to one spot, either submerged by pounding salt water or sitting, hunkered down til the next tide comes in?  I wonder how much it has to do with barnacles being unable to fight off the competition for more comfortable homes and how much it has to do with being better adapted for life in such hostile places than any other creature.  Is there an optimum size for a barnacle colony?  Can one barnacle survive on its own as an adult for long or does it need the help and support of its neighbours?  In my semi awake state I started to wonder about how a baby barnacle decides to set up home in a particular spot.  What does ‘des res’ look like to a barnacle and what would happen if they refused to settle down and decided to remain as a swimming species for the rest of their lives – would this cut their lives very short?  What would they achieve that they could not have achieved fixed to some rock or the underneath of my boat?

You might think this is all completely irrelevant to a blog about ceramics but I don’t think so.  My ceramic pieces are different and fragile.  They are about exoskeletons and protection and, believe me, nothing needs protection more than a barnacle does!  So later this morning I reached for the only book to hand, in our rather basic accommodation in Cornwall, that had any hope of answering my questions and I discovered a number of extraordinary facts.  I am not sure that I am not now left with more questions than answers but I do wonder why barnacles feed through their bottoms!  I am curious about the fact that barnacle larvae are called nauplius and cypris.  Who thought those up!  Most interesting of all I discover that, even among barnacles there is competition;- You would not find B.baliniodes living alongside C.stallatus for example.  The C. Stellatus just won’t let poor old balinoides settle down on its patch.

It is good to know that while I am away from the studio, sailing to my heart’s content, I have not been letting my brain addle.  I feel a series of barnacle shaped ceramics coming on . . . .

Ways of thinking

Sometimes in the heat of my studio I find it impossible to think at all but that does nothing to alleviate the problem of needing to plan a number of projects for next term at college.  The problem for me is that the expectation is that we fill sketch books with our ideas and come back next term bursting with clear understanding about how our plans can be converted into works of a 3D nature.  This is all well and good if you think in two dimensions.  The trouble is that I don’t!  I know this now.  It makes sketch books a bit of a problem – they can become very unwieldy very quickly!  So I have travelled my journey and thought about the metaphorical references to life in walking the length of the Thames from Barrier to source – some might say this was taking an uphill look at the problem – and I have wandered the internet and the local garden centres looking at fountains but in the end, there is nothing else for it.  I just had to penetrate the heat of the studio and make something. So here is the beginnings of my idea for the fountain and also for the river project.  I just hope they can develop a bit more on paper as well or my sketch book is going to be decidedly fat.

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The real fish which I used to do this cooked in the plaster of Paris causing a dreadful stink in the studio which hung around for days so I thought a would also take a sprig of the only bits which were left. I am sure I can use them somewhere!
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I have a wonderful piece of driftwood fished out of the river at Richmond. The plan is to position these on it with the line of the river running along them, the lines from a poem running through them and the images, or ghosts of images, from the walk flowing from one to the other.
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I don’t really throw so this project is something of a challenge to me – in which case, why not go kitsch!
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This is a core of the most fantastic clay dug from the river bank. It like a great terra cotta to me, almost pure. I am going to fire one to earthenware and one to stoneware to see what happens and then decide how to make use of them.