I feel exited, having some new pieces of minerals, just arrived in my studio. Testing random pieces of the earth, within the bodies of my pottery, couldn’t be anything else rather than fascinating!
All the pictures at this little post, are of earlier efforts of mine,to understand minerals. But it doesn’t really matters. The reason of this writing, is to express my pleasure, on having the opportunity, to give a try on mixing my clay with minerals, collected from the Himalayas and parts of India. Lapis lazuli, turquoise fragments full of copper, and more tiny examples which will affect or not the clay body of my pots.
There is a lot of technical information and knowledge within the process of collecting our own minerals, from nature. A heavy-duty, I could say. But most of all, there is the unexpected. We fill our kilns in, with surprises, that are taking us back to the enthusiasm of the early learning years. It’s like facing the missing ingredient, which was lost in a period of time. It’s also about a piece of land, with which we are connected in some way. We are collecting parts of our land- of our history, and melt them together, within our clay body, transforming this new mixture of ours, into a new natural element that will last, almost forever, in time.
The action of collecting minerals, mixing them with clay, and firing them, on the highest possible temperatures, becomes a bridge in time, between the million years of clay formation and the raw mineral parts, which are taken off the ground, at present time, in order to fuse into one, again. Eternity and a moment fluxes together, to create a time print.
vavatsis giorgos 