Clare Twomey

Just thinking about Clare Twomey's 2003 work Consciousness/Conscience...

"Consciousness/Conscience is a ceramic installation that is destroyed; it is made from one of the most precious and revered materials, Bone China. 7000 hollow cast bone china tiles is a lot of making for an individual crafts person. To maintain a constant form without deviation would be taxing for the individual maker. None of the above is impossible, just not logical for this project."

"The breaking of China is usually a moment for regret, and in the case of a much-used and well-loved domestic item one of great sadness. Twomey though, is excited by the ephemeral nature of her material and takes pleasure in its fragility, giving the breaking of it the same exhilarating possibilities encountered on walking over virgin snow." (Mark Currah)

But it's the footprint element of the work I'm interested in, and I go back to Creekery to look at the footprints we made that were such a problem at the time since they disrupted the smooth green carpet that made such a great canvas for the plates. APT sculptor Victoria Rance had said when I was worrying about it, "I quite like the footprints and the patterns they make..."

I bleached out some photos of the installation process to find the footprints. But these are just reminiscent of the photos I took at Christmas in my mother's garden, where foxes, magpies, blackbirds and robins made their patterns...

Anyway, Clare Twomey is awesome. Here's a pic from Trophy, a 2006 installation at the V&A.

More on Clare Twomey here.

Spode Buffalo Pattern

Spode Staffordshire antique blue & white pottery: Boy on a Buffalo Pattern Pearlware Plate c.1795-1800
Image found at www.antiqueblueandwhite.co.uk

Identification

My new friend Emma took some tiny fragments of ceramic from my World In Pieces (aka China Blues) installation at Creekside Centre to show her parents who are keen amateur experts in porcelain & earthenware. She recently brought back the fragments which her folks had identified and labelled for me...accompanied by a paper written by the Morden Ceramic Circle about the 'Buffalo Pattern', a strange variant of the Willow Pattern...

Christmas 2009

I received my first Xmas card from Debra...a charity card from Waterstone's featuring a Hiroshige Utagawa (1797-1858) print 'Drum Bridge and Setting Sun at Meguro'...Very thoughtful.
She sent it at the beginning of December, but I'm posting it up today because we're just having our first snow of the season...
Photo © Roger Nyle

Trouble Brewing

My mother sent me a clipping from her newspaper of an article printed the same day as the A Cup of Tea Solves Everything show opened (20 Feb). Peter Jenkinson was writing about the price of tea...In typical Daily Express scare fashion we are told "The price could rise by 50%".

"The main factors influencing the price of tea are...a weakening of the pound coupled with severe political unrest in Kenya, a major supplier of the commodity" (which is traded in dollars).

This is really an update on a similar story which was reported at the same time last year (Feb 08) when post election troubles started in Kenya and thousands of tea plantation workers were forced to flee the land as violence erupted, and wholesale prices rose by up to 30%.

Jenkinson says the industry has been reluctant to pass on cost increases to consumers. I'd say, though, that they've just been selling us CRAP tea. The PG Tips teabags I have been buying are rubbish.

But what I didn't know was this: "The reason for our close tea trading partnership with (Kenya) is all down to the method of production most widely used there called CTC...More than 99% of African tea is harvested using the Cut, Tear and Curl method. This results in the end product being a very fine particle of tea which suits teabag manufacture perfectly..."

Also: "As tea drinkers we have a tendency in Britain to decide that a brew is ready for us to drink when a certain redness in colour is achieved. African tea suits the quick-fix culture in which most of us live now. It reaches the ideal hue much more speedily because of the soil conditions present during the growing process..."

Apparently the market in connoisseur teas from China and India will hold up, since "some of us are willing to pay extra and try a little harder to find a flavour we would truly value...but most of us are sticking to builders tea and doing ourselves a disservice by the way we make it...The optimum amount of time to release the full flavour and all the beneficial qualities from a bag of tea is 90 seconds. Yet we Brits, on average, leave our teabags in water for just 38 seconds."

Co-incidentally, at the time I received my mother's clipping, I had just started a print design job for a local Caribbean dance company and was getting into African batik prints, and had bought a great selection of remnants for a tenner in the local African textile shop in the high street. I was surprised to find that most of the fabric sold there was made in Holland. The shop-keeper told me that her customers preferred the Dutch cloth to the African because it was better quality and lasted longer and kept its colours after several washes.

Here is a snap of one of those prints, which has a little of the Willow about it (although the design is probably based on the palm tree):