i am the cat whisperer
(via 8-bit Ghibli on Behance)
(Source: behance.net)
I do wonder if it’s enough to like a thing for its ‘thingness,’ for the inexplicable way your eyes and gut are drawn to a form. But I am at a point in my studio practice where I think it is okay to go to the studio to make the thing you love and daydream about the most, and to forget about all that academic pressure or need to intellectualize everything.
I am generalizing very broadly that there are two types of ways that artists approach clay; one is this squishy material that responds to touch in this very delightful way. As I was learning ceramics and coming up as a maker, I had almost the exact opposite viewpoint, and I think I represent people for whom the millennia of history that ceramics embodies are automatically there. The minute that I put my hands into clay I almost feel paralyzed by the continuum of approaches to clay. Again, there is sort of a pendulum even within the ceramics community; interest and dialogue seems to swing between these two poles, but luckily I think the ceramics community can automatically reconcile these two sides. The art world is concerned with its own story about what is saleable and what delights critics within that world, and it doesn’t always bear direct relationship to what’s going on among ceramic artists. There are different relationships that are prized within the ceramics community that don’t always have bearing on what is going on in the blue-chip art world.
—Garth Johnson: Feels Like Home | American Craft Council
(Source: craftcouncil.org)
(via Wangechi Mutu: Amazing Grace)
(Source: nasher.duke.edu)
Altschmerz
n. weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had—the same boring flaws and anxieties you’ve been gnawing on for years, which leaves them soggy and tasteless and inert, with nothing interesting left to think about, nothing left to do but spit them out and wander off to the backyard, ready to dig up some fresher pain you might have buried long ago.