Vesna's Blog

When was the last time you took pictures of yourself while preparing food? This felt similarly strange and awkward. I initially assumed that people would find the work-in-progress documentation boring, if not unnecessary, but I’ve been convinced otherwise. The question, “How do you build these things?”, comes up often, and I think now is a good time to address it, as I am currently working on a couple of new large coiled vessels for the 2012 summer exhibit at Gallery 180. Somewhere halfway into making the two new vessels I decided to take pictures with my phone, and so far the recording aspect is proving to be messy and difficult to keep up (phone covered in clay, getting sidetracked, missing shots, starting over) but I’m glad I’m doing it, however half-assed it may be. It’s nice to step back and look at some of the work that goes into these. I feel lucky to be able to work on them at the Loyola ceramics studio, where my colleagues are fantastic and the administration is incredibly tolerant of my extravagant endeavors. The students tend to get curious and inspired when they see me working on these, so in the end it’s truly a win-win.

I build these vessels out of coils made from a simple stoneware clay body. In order to give the clay added strength (during both building and firing) I tweak the recipe by adding extra grog and a handful of nylon fibers. I begin the process by wheelthrowing something that looks like a dog bowl, and then I stack four coils on its rim and blend them together. Once blended and smoothed (by kicking the wheel and using a wooden rib to flatten the clay), I let the wall dry and stiffen a bit. Then I stack four more, and so on… This is a relatively straightforward method. It’s not as easy as it looks though, as it requires both decent wheelthrowing skills and an understanding of how clay responds to water, compression, drying, etc., but with practice it gets easier. I tend to use a serrated (i.e. toothed) metal scraper to score the coil lengthwise before pressing it onto the rim. I usually don’t use any slip unless the rim has dried and there is a slight difference in the moisture content between the rim and the next coil.

The real trickery comes in when it’s time to create a second (or third… or fourth…) wall, as I did in Fornix Vessel. This is the part that tends to mystify people. It’s really not that difficult once you get the hang of the basic process. Unlike a small double-walled vessel thrown on a wheel, in these large vessels the extra wall is simply added onto the surface of the existing wall. The picture shows two extra coils added to the surface of the vessel. I decided that my usual four-coil method wasn’t going to work in this delicate step, so I held back and initially used only two. The most difficult part after this is keeping up with two walls separately without damaging one while working on the other. I tend to have several oddly shaped wooden tools at hand so I can get between the two walls and keep smoothing them as I move along, adding more coils to each wall.

The plans for this particular double-walled vessel are pictured on the bottom right of my sketchbook. Once carved, the vessel’s body will vaguely resemble a human skull placed vertically on end (with sutures that are still growing together) while the top fluted part will stay vessel-like and relatively traditional. Currently I am imagining the top in a red glaze, but I rarely plan the colors and textures before seeing the finished form.

The second of the two vessels that I’m currently working on is pictured in the upper right-hand corner of the sketchbook. This one is quite challenging, and I’m not sure that it will even work out, but I’m giving it a shot. Basically, right now I’m throwing the vessel itself. Later I’ll be worrying about cutting it in half, attaching it to a plinth or base of sorts, and adding “ribs.” You can see the work in progress in the foreground of the next picture. As revealed by this photo, the fluted top is something that I throw separately and then attach to the rest of the vessel. The neck is just too narrow and subtle of a form to be made out of coils. In the following step I will use a ribbon tool to trim away the additional clay where the seam is slightly mismatched.

With this basic method for coiling a large vessel, I like to play with variations and challenges. In Eggshell Vessel, I threw the fluted top separately as usual (making sure that the bottom of this part was much wider than the top) and then flipped it upside-down into the large form. Once it all meshed and stiffened a bit, I continued coiling as though I never added the upside-down fluted form, and at some point along the way I trimmed off the excess clay that was protruding from the sides. The “broken through” opening was something that I carved out at the very end.

Did this entry clarify things or just create more questions? It is relatively concise (considering how much subtlety goes into ceramic work!), so my intern and I will make a much more detailed step-by-step account of this process, most likely in April. Having a second set of hands will help, since taking timed pictures while working is otherwise kind of impossible without a fancy camera… and, well, you know the sorts of cameras I tend to work with.

A medical humanities journal recently asked the following question for their upcoming feature on artists who have a background in science: “What is the purpose of your art? What do you hope to achieve through your work?”

This question comes up frequently in theoretical discussions, so I decided to share my current take on the matter here on my blog. I find it easier to explain my position on art by supporting it with something that has at least somewhat of a unanimously assigned cultural function. Science works well for me in this regard; I believe that science is closely related to art. It’s easiest to see the connection between science and art by observing how closely they worked together throughout the Renaissance. But that’s a whole other topic.

So here it goes, the purpose of art (and how it compares to the purpose of science):

If the purpose of science is to seek answers to what we don’t know yet, perhaps the purpose of art is to question what we think we already know. With this in mind, I can see how the two fields can be perceived as contrasting, but to me they really are two sides of the same coin. I never saw art as a form of expression, nor a quest for beauty. I think that these cliches have been falsely ascribed to artists. Art may appear to have these purposes when seen from the other end: from the standpoint of the viewer, historian, or critic (perhaps because the end result of the art process may appear expressive or beautiful) but I don’t believe that most artists enter the field with egotistic or hedonistic motives. There is always an exploration at hand. It often feels as though I am curiously searching for a new way of characterizing something. But that is probably putting it too simply.

An even more important thing to consider here is the value that we place on the two fields. I think it’s safe to say that science is commonly perceived as more valuable than art in its purpose. I’m basing this on the amount of funding, public attention, and common daily references to both fields. I think that this imbalance is detrimental to humankind. As much as we find it useful to seek structure and make sense of the world, it’s just as important to examine and investigate our paradigms and biases.

At an art conference in Chicago today, I met a person who teaches photography at Wilbur Wright College. She reminded me of something I did with my intermediate class at Wright several years ago. Apparently the activity left such an impression on students that they still talk about it to this day (I haven’t taught at Wright for a few semesters now). This is what we did: we turned a classroom into a camera, i.e. we made a camera out of a classroom. However you want to put it. The common term for this sort of thing is camera obscura (translated “room dark”, from latin). It’s strange to contemplate the fact that for short we now call all of our cameras, well, rooms.

In the second week of View Camera class at Oakton Community College (on 2/3/2010), I took my students across campus to a room that was perfect for turning into a camera. This often sounds strange or impossible at first (which is part of what makes it so much fun). It’s actually pretty easy to do and it demonstrates how all cameras work. Here’s how you do it:

1. Find a room with closed doors, a nice view (facing a busy street), white walls, and very few windows, preferably just one.
2. Completely black the room out at noon on a sunny day. (No light should be present anywhere… not even from an appliance or watch.) Cover the windows and cracks around doors using a material that is light-proof.
3. Put a round dime-sized hole in whatever is covering the window. (I like to use black foam-core board – it’s easy to cut and put in place.) You can use a larger hole, but it will render the image slightly blurry.
4. Wait 5 minutes and look around, especially on the ceiling and wall opposite the hole. You’ll see what’s outside… upside down in full color!

This semester at Oakton I asked one of the students to photograph the event (thanks Danny Lee!) using a digital camera borrowed from the photography area. In the first image (above) you can see a student sitting at the end of a table on the left side next to a large white wall, with an image of the building across from us projected upside down. In the second image (left) I’m holding a white board to make a part of the image clearer… One of the students went outside and is waving his arms at us (you can see him as a shadowed figure, standing next to a gray door on the board I’m holding). If you do decide to leave the room, you won’t be able to see anything (once you come back inside) for quite some time until your pupils adjust again.

In the third image (right) I’m holding the same white board with a small black rectangle (5″x4″) drawn on it, demonstrating the effects of rear standard movements (were they to be done on a regular view camera). These camera movements affect perspective distortion, and are often used to correct distortion in architectural photography, among other subjects. Just by tilting or swinging the back of the camera you can make the lines of the building appear parallel to each other. The small black rectangle is the same size as the film we’re using in class, and the board is being held up right on the edge of the image of the upside-down roof with the blue sky clearly visible right below it.

In the next image (left), you can see the same board held up right in front of the hole. The hole now has a lens in it, and the board has an image circle projected in full color.

The first time I had my class do this activity was back at OSU in Columbus, OH, in 2003. Our classroom was on the 4th floor, looking out on a large campus square where students walked in all directions between classes. Seeing that it was the largest student population in the country (I believe they have 50,000 undergrads alone), it was quite a strange experience. Hundreds of tiny dark figures with matching shadows walked upside-down across the ceiling of our classroom in all directions, like ants.

I’ve done this activity at Oakton for several semesters now, starting with the History of Photography classes back in 2006. One summer I taught in a classroom that didn’t lend itself to the camera obscura, so a student decided to try one in his apartment with a friend of his. You can see the video he made. Because the video is sped up, only two of the stills show the actual camera obscura effect; you’ll need to pause it right there!

There is a professional artist who created an entire body of work based on the camera obscura: Abelardo Morell. What I like about his photographs is the juxtaposition of the mundane with the exotic. All of the images are shot in mundane settings: hotels, bedrooms, bathrooms, etc. Yet the views he chooses are often clichéd postcard settings, such as the Eiffel Tower, or Times Square, or the St. Louis Arch. He shows us views that most of us are exposed to via postcards rather than life, something that is picture perfect in our memories, and that most of us will probably see in a photograph before we see it in “real life.” Yet in his camera obscuras, these images are upside down, distorted, and raw. They are made real again. I see these camera obscura images as a reminder (or introduction?) of the powerful function and influence photography has on our psyches and in our culture.