I have often wondered why one of my great loves does not influence my ceramics. After all, my work is about vessels which carry a story. So why does my love of sailing not come in somewhere? The answer escapes me but, in a week where progress in the studio has been just that – progress – and we have had our first outing of the year in Annika, I decided not to write for the sake of it and instead to share with you the two aspects of my love for vessels.
During a week of serious preparation for the up coming exhibition in East Molesey I have been having a polishing bonanza.
Annika: This was taken last summer in warmer conditions but we did enjoy a quick once round the Manacle Buoy and then back home under spinnaker in a lovely 17 knots of breeze yesterday.
To the beautiful sea and the sky, I find the rocks exciting and have simply no idea why! (with sincere apologies to John Masefield).
Actually I do. Take the Lizard Peninsular for example. I was there this week collecting a lovely piece of ceramics from Richard Phethean which I had bought at a master class given by him last Sunday. (More of that in another post). The sun was shining – which it had steadfastly failed to do for the preceding few days – and I was motivated to check in on the igeology app on my phone to find somewhere interesting to explore. Sure enough it was not long before I was indulging in a geology fest on a beautiful beach backed by glorious cliffs and with a myriad of rock pools and some pretty nasty looking rocks out in the surf waiting to snare any passing sailors.
Nasty rocks waiting to snare any unwary yachtsmen!
The app described an area of ‘Unnamed Igneous Intrusion, Devonian – Felsic-rock. Igneous Bedrock formed approximately 359 to 416 million years ago in the Devonian Period. Local environment previously dominated by intrusions of silica-rich magma’. Cool! Loads of interesting things might happen to a small sample of this mixed into porcelain in the kiln. But to be frank, I think the app was only telling a small part of the story. Everywhere I turned the colours altered. There were red rocks, green rocks, blue rocks: a regular case of rock porn! I scampered around on the beach like a kid in a sweet shop exclaiming at the colours in the pebbles on the beach and admiring the shells – even they seemed to have absorbed some of the magic of the place and shone with an iridescent golden glow.
Of course, being the disorganised clot that I am, this was the moment for my camera battery to give up and I came home with almost no images of the strata. Hopeless! But the reassuring thing is that I now know of yet another great place to go to the next time that I need to marvel at the incredible beauty of our landscape.
I must go down to the sea again!
I am also driven to seek out my geology books and discover precisely what I was looking at.