It starts with a night on the wheel in a new place where I didn't feel at home, and thus didn't know what to make. I throw four little sake dishes out of a local Watershed clay, decide I don't want to make anything else until the residency starts, and they sit for a month unfinished. Eventually, they get fired in a salt kiln and I end up making over 800 of them. I actually have no good estimate on how many there actually are, but that I will figure out before the show in Februray.
There are two ways I'm thinking of organizing the hundreds of dishes, and the image above is just one of those ways. In that one, I'm playing with pattern, textiles, and functional clay, all rolled into one. The dishes are going to be sewn together to that they can hang freely in space, so that both "top" and "bottom" of the dishes are visible. Though they'll be hanging, they will be tight enough to still translate the pattern and direction of the design as one cohesive unit. In the other one, I'm playing with the idea of the mandala as a representation of time, meditation, the microcosms and the macrocosms of the universe through the arrangement of a multitude of smaller pieces.
Read up on mandalas, they're beautiful things.These two will be at the Worcester, MA show in February!
