Saturday, September 29, 2007
I've just discovered seed beads as part of the glaze
A flickr designer displayed some method to her creations and, even though the internet was mean and wouldn't tell me, I now have comfirmation that seed beads can be melted into ceramics. Thank the heavens!
Thursday, September 27, 2007
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Glazed Abstraction
It is so hard to find good purples... you have no idea (unless you do, in which case you'll appreciate my efforts here). This glaze is a little dull from a distance but quite lovely up close.
Smooth Points
I really am in love with these colours. I submitted this one to a season's contest online under Fall... it's so summery but the colour really seems to be turning, just like a leaf. I doubt this will win because, really, it's very simple. I'm content with it though!
Aqua is Always 'In'
I'm so in love with this piece, I'll never sell it. The ceramic pendant is quite small but the glaze is sublime. It was, I think, my first real sucess, standing out like a gem on the tray of first attempts. I'm not entirely satisfied with the beads around it... but the nice thing about owning something you've made is that you can always take it apart.
The Dark Side of Bead Work
This is not as popular a piece as I might have thought. I've adopted it into my personal collection though, and wear it happily.
Pretending the Subtle
This turned out to be quite a popular piece, although not a personal favourite. I have a feeling it will go at my next show.
Share and share alike
So. I make jewelry. To my surprise, I sell my jewelry. The pendants are always ceramic because I love the versitility of clay and the wild and beautiful colours and effects of glazes. Right now, I'm working on my new line. In all probability, there won't be as many pieces in my November show as in my August show, but I hope the pieces will be a little more sophisticated, a little more marketable, and a little closer to perfection. I hope I'm learning and growing as an artist... I hope that one day very soon, I'll enter my work into a big show, and sell to perfect strangers, obligation free and gain new audiences. Wish me luck. Do it now. :P
Yellow Rusts
I'm so fond of this piece! I love glazes that mix and mingle, but I'm even more fond of the moments in pieces where a glaze stands on its own and refuses to mingle and react to the glazes around it.
Science is Not Fact
I'll use a classic example here, so I don't run into problems mixing my metephors. Imagine facts as you would in a murder mystery book. On page 182, our suspect is a man whose finger prints were found all over the room, whose blood matches the blood we've found on the scene, and who is described, exactly, by a young man with perfect vision and near perfect recollection, as the person killing our victim in a very distictive way with a Golf club. As it turns out, our suspect is also a pro golfer whose measured swing is in line with the forensic reading of blunt force our victim suffered. Of course, on page 213, we find out that the suspect has an identical twin brother. Now, this is hardly good fiction. It's too obvious and too improbable. Once you've read the explanation once, the punchline is forever ruined for you... and I guarentee you've read it at least once.
Now on another plant, one in which identical twins are more prevelant, the mystery would have seemed so obvious you need not have read past page 182. So where do we run into problems. Where do we find a people who would be so fooled by such a riddle, the answer would never occur to them? We would have to find a world of 'one's. The liklihood of such a world, I'll admit, is rather preposterous. But this is only because we are looking for an exact missing fact. When the missing fact could be anything at all, the probability of 'here' being in any way different from 'there' rises significantly. Science assures us that, because we can see 'over there', that we may gather information about 'over there' in every way that matters. So much depends on where 'over there' is. What if, by a definition we have not yet found parametres for, anything truly 'over there' is invisible to the naked eye. What if other realms and other spaces exist 'over there' that we are not in tune with? Science runs a cable of rules from 'here' to 'there'. They are 'universal constants'. It tests theories of light and energy and finds very few dark spots, one per gallexy. Science had predicted these dark spots. Science is facinated with these dark spots. There is a wiff in the air that these dark spots are page 213. Science is not fact but, so long as there are universal constants, so long as the predictions of science are made and questioned, rephrased and answered, there is the hope that science will, one day, compute all the facts.
I suspect that day, were it to arise, would not give birth to an enlightened humanity, science's secret hope. When we run out of facts, when we are forced to admit our own puny futures from our own puny reality, I suspect we will do as we have always done and ignore facts, twist them, molest them with meaning. After that, if we survive, we may truly begin to understand. Perhaps we will understand because we will shrink the universe down to our level of understanding. Perhaps we will simply be more. Perhaps understanding will be all that is left of us.
Then they will say of us:
Here lies humanity: They understood so that we did not have to.
Peace,
Nicole
Now on another plant, one in which identical twins are more prevelant, the mystery would have seemed so obvious you need not have read past page 182. So where do we run into problems. Where do we find a people who would be so fooled by such a riddle, the answer would never occur to them? We would have to find a world of 'one's. The liklihood of such a world, I'll admit, is rather preposterous. But this is only because we are looking for an exact missing fact. When the missing fact could be anything at all, the probability of 'here' being in any way different from 'there' rises significantly. Science assures us that, because we can see 'over there', that we may gather information about 'over there' in every way that matters. So much depends on where 'over there' is. What if, by a definition we have not yet found parametres for, anything truly 'over there' is invisible to the naked eye. What if other realms and other spaces exist 'over there' that we are not in tune with? Science runs a cable of rules from 'here' to 'there'. They are 'universal constants'. It tests theories of light and energy and finds very few dark spots, one per gallexy. Science had predicted these dark spots. Science is facinated with these dark spots. There is a wiff in the air that these dark spots are page 213. Science is not fact but, so long as there are universal constants, so long as the predictions of science are made and questioned, rephrased and answered, there is the hope that science will, one day, compute all the facts.
I suspect that day, were it to arise, would not give birth to an enlightened humanity, science's secret hope. When we run out of facts, when we are forced to admit our own puny futures from our own puny reality, I suspect we will do as we have always done and ignore facts, twist them, molest them with meaning. After that, if we survive, we may truly begin to understand. Perhaps we will understand because we will shrink the universe down to our level of understanding. Perhaps we will simply be more. Perhaps understanding will be all that is left of us.
Then they will say of us:
Here lies humanity: They understood so that we did not have to.
Peace,
Nicole
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Monday, September 24, 2007
Your tragedy too
So, if someone asked you what your tragedy was... if, standing at the edge of eternal bliss, someone were to turn you around and ask you "what makes you think you deserve to be here?" what would you say? There are only really two answers to this question, so you better decide which one is yours. Either you deserve to be there because the tragedy count starts so far back, when you were a kid, when you couldn't help being a victim of it, no matter what, or it started late, real late, and every tragedy is of your own making. Don't worry though - none of you fall into the later. You'd have to be the child of an enormously wealthy movie producer who thought ahead enough that you never had a pet goldfish or a servant over 25. You would have to had to encounter death for the first time at an age where you were so corrupted, that in itself would serve as a tragedy enough. It hasn't happened yet.
The encounter with death for those who grow up torchered or torchering is perverted horribly. To encounter death too young is to be indelibly scared by it. I wonder sometimes if they go numb or if they feel it as acutely as you and I would if we suddenly switched body. There are two camps of thought on this issue. Those who buy gas for their tanks and diamonds for their fiancees would be wise to consider which they fall into and which they would like to.
Before compliance sets in, remember, for He or They who do not encounter death at all, we are all thus considered.
The encounter with death for those who grow up torchered or torchering is perverted horribly. To encounter death too young is to be indelibly scared by it. I wonder sometimes if they go numb or if they feel it as acutely as you and I would if we suddenly switched body. There are two camps of thought on this issue. Those who buy gas for their tanks and diamonds for their fiancees would be wise to consider which they fall into and which they would like to.
Before compliance sets in, remember, for He or They who do not encounter death at all, we are all thus considered.
Saturday, September 22, 2007
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