Rainstones
I’ve heard it said that your materials, like your purpose in life, finds you. It’s a bit like your style. You can’t force it to happen but the way you use your materials consistently creates your style. When you try something new, the experience can be exciting, challenging and sometimes quite revealing.
This week I tried my hand at ceramics. I’ve attempted to mould with clay a couple of times before, but never had hugely successful results. I like the feeling of the mud in my hands, but can never work out how to shape it right. When the opportunity came around to work in the ceramic studio at this artist residency at the Fish Factory, I thought why not.
Staying with my project, I decided to keep it simple. I’ll make some ceramic stones. While others were carefully making bowls, cups and figures, I caressed the wet clay into little stone shapes, the sort I’d like to pick up off the ground and hold in my palm. During the process of the week we put oxide on our creations, had them bisque fired and then glazed them before their final firing.
These little “rainstones” didn’t take long to make, nor was I particularly attached to the outcome, but they turned out better than I expected. The blue stones are my favourite and as I laid them on my cyanotype print of stones to take the picture, I realised they related to each other quite well. They embody the stones I have been making prints and collages about. The images of rocks and rain, the text of mud and flood, the reports about climate change and its impact on communities and human habitation.
The upshot of this experiment is that have extended my way of thinking and added another 3D component to my Stone Stories project. The tactile experience of holding a stone in your hand animates the material. Taking this further, the stones and rocks and mountains in a landscape become animate once you form a relationship with them.
In my last blog post I talked about Petra walking the mountains behind her home in Stöðvarfjörður collecting stones. People I have met in the town also talk about going to the beach or climbing the mountain to collect stones for their gardens. There is something wonderful about caressing a stone.
As I finish this artist residency, my geo-narrative Stones Stories has revealed to me the necessity of forming a personal relationship with our landscape. I have travelled across to the other side of the world to now understand that this is intrinsic to the way we view ourselves as humans on planet earth.
It brings to mind that often quoted line from John Kennedy in his 1961 inaugural speech as US president “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.”
I started this project from the premise of bearing witness to climate change through the stories of millennia held within stones. But what if the way we view the land is intrinsic to our relationships with it, not as a resource to be exploited but as an animate entity worthy of our respect and love.
Embedded in Our Psyche, 2022. 15cm x 4cm .Cyanotype collage.
Intense Rains 2022. 15cm x 4cm .Cyanotype collage.
This project is supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW.
