I hope you can excuse the lengthy radio silence. I’ve been pouring porcelain.
As you may remember I designed and sculpted an entire new range of 24th scale dolls last Autumn. It took weeks. I then made the moulds for them all, which also took weeks and then life, principally the care of my mother and Christmas and all that intervened. Just before Christmas I put the moulds, which had spent weeks drying on radiators and then weeks finishing off in a plastic supermarket crate with vented sides, in the lounge, so glamorously, in the garage.
Oh that is dangerous behaviour. Art of any kind has a momentum of its own. You cannot tell a picture how long you will be painting it, or estimate how long to sculpt a sculpture. Real art starts in your head and comes out through your finger ends, it is a physical and mental process. Like getting pregnant or learning to ride a bike a lot of it happens while you are asleep or wandering round the supermarket.
It is not craft. Craft workers can tell you how long it takes to make something. I can tell you how long it takes to wire, stuff and sew a doll body. I can tell you how many I can do in a day. Craft workers in factories have to make a number of pieces each hour and are paid accordingly. The craft of something is a learned skill, which, providing you are dextrous and can follow a given set of steps in the right order, most people can achieve. You can start it at the start of the working day and do it for so many hours, with breaks and then stop.
Art, however, is a thing being brought into being. If you stop and put it in the garage it may quietly die before you get back to it. So I was overjoyed to rescue the box over a week ago and get pouring. In the interval I had, naturally, forgotten what I had made. I marvelled at how tiny they were and then at how very difficult they were to pour and pour out. Some fool had moulded a pair of heads upside down so they came out with no brains and had to be mended. Some idiot (same one) had made very thin and weedy upper arms that came out of the moulds predictably shredded. Most of all, I marvelled at how many dolls I had created and how many of them might prove impossible to pour.
For days and days I stood in the perishing kitchen with wet hands and feet like blocks of ice. Then I remembered the heated towel rail and switched it on. Then the OT fetched the heater the plumber had suggested we buy, and for lo! despite it being cheap and nasty it worked (though I wouldn’t leave it heating anything unsupervised.)
Finally, last night at midnight I stopped, having had all those days where I hardly thought about anyone else at all. I washed the kitchen floor, ordered my mother’s groceries at half past midnight and started rescuing my poor hands which are cut all over and bleeding. Ideally porcelain should be poured at the equinox, not at the coldest or hottest part of the year.
Will any dolls come out of it? It’s difficult to say. I think the jointed baby is a gonner before we begin, I only managed to pour three, and, even though it’s quite a fat baby, it doesn’t look as if there will be room inside it for the stringing. That’s another thing, I can’t get hold of the 0.5mm Japanese hat elastic anymore. I found a reel of it in China but can’t tell how strong it is from a photo. I may have to string with jewellery elastic but have doubts about how well it will knot.
This bit of art has been purgatory for my hands but a holiday for my head. Which proves it is indeed art, the job of which is to hold an inspiring mirror to life whilst lifting your spirit from the mundanities of your own.
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JaneinspiredLaverick.com