Distraction, procrastination & feeling lost

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Post Christmas assessment left me feeling very unsettled, although I got good marks and feedback from my assessment, I felt unsatisfied with the work, and did not feel like it was conveying for me what I was trying to say. I was starting to question whether the focus on Fungi was either not enough or too much and I couldn't work it out and settle myself into any kind of making rhythm.

I looked back into my earlier learning agreements, and the work I had been interested in when I moved away from the very landscape/texture based forms I had developed in year one. Form and clean lines have always been strong aspects of my aesthetic but texture and organic surfaces have also continued to be features in my pieces, so I decided to see if I could incorporate some of these elements into the fungal forms.

I then went down a bit of a 'rabbit hole' and made two pieces of work where the subject of the work was fungal based but I wanted to push the 'other worldly' surreal aspects and see what came out of the other side.

I revisited the work of Toni Losey who I came accross at the International Ceramics Festival,  whom I have written about separately here www.weebly.com/editor/main.php#/ below is an image of Toni Losey's work and you can see from this piece the references I was trying to make, albeit a poorer attempt to echo her style.

Although this piece was interesting to make I did not feel that it was successful and was too big a departure from what I had only  just started to develop, I was questioning if I was just repeating old patterns of behaviour. I had got bored, things were not working so well right now, so let's change tac. The problem with this approach is you end up being ok to average at several things, instead of really investigating and developing an idea with real conviction. I could have pushed this style of work and continued to investigate the potential, and yes it would have gotten better, become more refined but I knew that I would be bouncing onto something new without seeing my existing work through so I stopped. ​

I had also discovered some work by a Uruguay artist called Carol Young that I was really interested in, Her work, like that of other ceramic artists I am influenced by, work held those same echoes of curved, organic forms, with smooth lines and shapes and a quality of softness despite the material. 

Below are some images of her work taken from Instagram/Google, there is not much written about her online, but there is something beautiful and evocative about these forms.

This self-doubt, sense of imposter syndrome and general feeling of not knowing what I was trying to do continued into February and I found myself trying to recreate one of Carol's pieces with a view to using glazes I had been developing to change the look and style of the piece. Again this was a 'rabbit hole' and although it kind of worked it was far too much of a 'copy' and the glazing wasn't particularly successful. Again more indepth learning and development was going to be needed to create quality work and I realised that I needed to stop and re-evaluate exactly where I was at and what needed to happen to shift me back into a more positive and creative mindset.

​Below are images of this piece. The one on the far right shows the piece glazed, I tried playing around with gloop glaze that I had been testing at the same time and spraying on underglaze but I wasn't convinced of the outcome being successful, it was too polite in it's boldness, so not polite enough and as such I felt didn't work. It either needed to be much more intensely glazed with colour and effects or not at all. Leaving it plain would have been better in my view but not acceptable as a piece I could expand on as it was just too similar in aesthetics to Carol Young's piece, I was reminded what Austin Kleon said, "Great Artists don't copy they steal". It was time to have another rethink!