Ben Richardson
Boulder 2004
H: 25 cm
W: 27 cm
$600
The clay body is prepared in the workshop using a mixture of local wild clays with added feldspar and silica. The forms are thrown and altered with rope impressions and tool marking, glazed with nepheline syenite, aplite and local ochre-contaminated kaolin - which has been made up with sea water and fired in a small anagama with black wattle for 26 hours.
Maker's statement: My home and workshop is on the south-eastern edge of Tasmania, on the edge of the southern ocean, a place of eroded cliffs, refracted ocean swells, rock stacks and the linear natural and human patterning of the tidal zone. This is my place of making and my making uses the materials of this place.
Increasingly it has been important for me to respond through form and surface to both my immediate environment and that of my materials. This engagement is for me the core of making in the crafts - in a very fundamental sense they are the arts of engagement. The sense of a localised or regional response through indigenous materials to culture is a way of differentiating my work from that of industrial production. Wherever possible I am using local materials, certainly for my clay bodies but also for my glazes, trying to sense their potential through testing and use.
Form grows; in this case from seeing the negative space beneath water rounded dolerite boulder on a local beach. This is overlaid with rope impressions that suggest the natural patterning of wind on water and sand. The tool markings are my response to seeing the griding of oyster leases in the lagoon viewed from my workshop, as they are rhythmically revealed and hidden by tidal fluctuation.
I developed this form with arrangements of fire blackened branches and new coastal Banksia foliage in mind, but the use is unprescribed in the specific, as it is in the creative act of seeing, sensing and using, that potency is revealed and renewed.
My home and workshop is on the south-eastern edge of Tasmania, on the edge of the southern ocean, a place of eroded cliffs, refracted ocean swells, rock stacks and the linear natural and human patterning of the tidal zone. This is my place of making and my making uses the materials of this place.
Increasingly it has been important for me to respond through form and surface to both my immediate environment and that of my materials. This engagement is for me the core of making in the crafts ? in a very fundamental sense they are the arts of engagement. The sense of a localised or regional response through indigenous materials to culture is a way of differentiating my work from that of industrial production. Wherever possible I am using local materials, certainly for my clay bodies but also for my glazes, trying to sense their potential through testing and use.
Form grows; in this case from seeing the negative space beneath water rounded dolerite boulder on a local beach. This is overlaid with rope impressions that suggest the natural patterning of wind on water and sand. The tool markings are my response to seeing the griding of oyster leases in the lagoon viewed from my workshop, as they are rhythmically revealed and hidden by tidal fluctuation.
I developed this form with arrangements of fire blackened branches and new coastal Banksia foliage in mind, but the use is unprescribed in the specific, as it is in the creative act of seeing, sensing and using, that potency is revealed and renewed.
