Assignment #2, Inspiration

Assignment #2: INSPIRATION

I am inspired by 12^th century Japanese potters.  Although I know almost nothing of individual 12^th century Japanese potters, or even the general history of the culture and art of that historical era, in my mind I imagine that they had a certain freedom of purpose at that time which balanced the spiritual and practical aspects of fired clay.  My fictional attachment to that era is clearly mythical and personal, with little basis in fact.  Balanced against that myth is the concrete reality of clay and it’s plastic nature.  The act of creating clay objects is an exercise in abstracting the ideals of an established ethos (12^th century Japanese ceramics) in the language of utilitarian 21^st century objects.   For this reason, most of my pieces are fictional, abstract, and contradictory.

Art for me is a balance between accepting and challenging.  We accept the traditional markers of our culture but challenge those assumptions in our own way in the present.   Artists work from their own established cultural backdrop but challenge the assumptions defining their medium, they accept the confines of the chosen materials but resist the dictates of established approaches to those materials, they both accept what is absorbed culturally and challenge established assumptions about the materials, the use, the purpose, and the products of art.

 

As an artist I utilize history, and what I know of the past much as I would use a blank canvas or a slab of clay, to define for myself a point of departure.  Because history is a collection of personal assumptions, gleaned from a few facts that have been passed down to us, it is generally mythical on a personal level, imparting a background from which to interact with the future.  As artists we work in the future but our finished pieces are a tribute to the past, a combination of the accepted beliefs and discovery, played out in the challenges of understanding the present.  Balancing those extremes, we must first identify with a mental construct from which we ourselves were derived (a construct that is inherently fictional), and keep our vision solidly in new beginnings, new forms, new formats.   Art isn’t so much a challenge as a process of creating challenges, and thus the back and forth gauntlet of passage between past and future.  That avenue of exploration allows the artist to dwell in the present when they succeed in joining those concepts of time on a personal level.  In the end, after all that we accept and challenge, art is a process for experiencing the present through an arbitrary medium.  What is more fitting than materials derived from the earth (clay) and processed  much as the Earth has been processed through fire and time. 

 Stay tuned for upcoming posts including, (1) Art Is, (2) making ceramic signs, and (3) assignment #3