I don’t know if this happens to other makers out there, but I sometimes forget to purposefully carve out time to have fun. I love making, I enjoy it, but very often in the past I have found myself making things that I had to make, completing orders. Having no time to explore. No time for fun.
This year, my friends got me a sculpture course at Morley College. Five weeks during which I was going to be introduced to different materials: plaster, metal, wood and my good old friend clay.
As a potter, I have been taught to be somehow scared of plaster. Watch out with plaster. If any bits of it goes into the clay it will make it explode in the kiln. What a nightmare. Plaster. I had learnt to see it as the help. With plaster one can make moulds to make with clay. With plaster, one can dry clay to recycle it. Always being wary of it. Terrifying stuff. Plaster.
And then at the course I got to know plaster in its own right. I learnt to make mounds out of clay to make with plaster. Who’s the help now? And I learnt to use plaster to make. Similarly to clay, it has it timings and one needs to learn its flow. One moment is liquid and it slips through your fingers. The next, rock solid. That process is so fast - I found it very exciting. That intimacy, that alertness. It made me feel very in tune with the material in order to be able to use it the way I wanted.
What did I make? I don’t know. I used chicken wire, hessian, I even welded metal. I just had so much fun. So mission accomplished.
What I did try was to encapsulate those stages in the life of plaster. The different textures, the movement, passion and sense of life that one can achieve using plaster. All in the space of no longer than three minutes.
