Master of Fine Arts Thesis
Alchemy Juice
Alex M. Zablocki
Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirement for the degree of Master of Fine Arts, School of Art and Design
Division of Ceramic Art
New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University Alfred, New York
2017
Alex M. Zablocki, MFA
Walter McConnell, Thesis Advisor
Acknowledgments
My lovely Wife Victoria My faculty and friends My Mother and Father
My work is a marathon exercise in the deconstruction and adaptation of vessel aesthetics, form, function, conventions and histories. I remain alchemically adventurous by employing a wide range of materials, processes, chance and humor. Through risk, exploration, and random experimental compositions, I push against categories. Vessels are no longer made to use and sculptures operate within a size similar to pottery. In my work, the intimacy of scale alongside carefully considered surfaces and structures invites the viewer in on a visceral and optical adventure in which I provoke the senses by incorporating a cornucopia of rich and exotic theatrics.
Humor and Theatrics
The truth will often make you laugh. Humor can lighten. Sometimes laughter is the best medicine. My ceramic work conspires to operate similarly by taking apart the ceramic vessel and re-animating its constituent parts out of context.
The animated vestiges of utilitarian ceramics are free to perform as comic objects frozen in acrobatic recombination. The proper anatomy of the vessel is let loose and the constituent parts slip along viscous saturations of colored glaze.
Disembodied handles somersault, support, wrestle and engage with irregular and geometric volumes embellished with sumptuous drips of fluid glaze.
Within my work and research, I source material for humor from comic books, science fiction movies, cartoons, and stand up comedy. These sources inspire my absurd and playful, experiential rearrangement of the familiar that is common in my practice. I commonly employ oppositional pairings: awkward/elegant, natural/artificial, clever/dumb, ambiguous/obvious, reserved/exaggerated, rational/absurd. These pairings are conveyed through material and
compositional relationships and become opportunities that create a humorous atmosphere in and around the work, further heightening the sense of fantasy and illusion.
An interest in the transmutation of materials has left me alchemically liberal and drawn to the theatrical. Drama connotes exciting, emotional, or unexpected events or circumstances and theatrics connotes excessive behavior. I frequently
integrate a plinth, stand, or ground - like a stage - as a place for my objects to sit and perform. Display animates the theatrical possibilities. Elevated tension, delicate balance, and hyperbole are the tools I use to bring the work to life. My objects entertain and charm as they dance with light and shadow and flirt with gravity in curious ways. Precariously stacked forms display gyroscopic tendencies and reveal a heightened awareness and a sense of wonder. Lush, generous glazed surfaces seductively stimulate the senses. Handles bounce and coil like springs or rubber bands and thin-walled vessels deform into pyroclastic flows that emulate flaccid, sagging body parts. The coming together of two cylinders appear to squeeze out an oozing drip of glaze like squishy, green phlegm or chewed bubble gum.
I search for the extension of an experience. Through a duration of engagement, I seduce the viewer or myself into thinking we have discovered something new.
These theatrics are delightfully optical, visceral, and allow for an interaction with things that we think we know or are familiar with, in a different or evocative position.
I incorporate ceramic material’s uncanny ability to mimic the familiar. Through mimicry, thick slices of juicy orange glaze trans mutate into household sponges, hearty drips fall like melted Velveeta cheese, and luminous surfaces become confectious candy coatings. A bit of trickery and deception can arouse curiosity.
Challenging perception calls for further investigation, bringing to light the
intricacies within the performative and excessive behavior of the work. Intimate scale and compelling surfaces seduce and draw you in. Much like the
perplexing and seemingly impossible event of a flea circus or the flying trapeze, I demonstrate my skill with ceramic materials to provoke a sense of wonderment and illusion.
Chance, Intent, Discovery
My little sister and I placed quarters and nickels on the train track down the road from our home. Tails up or heads down we stacked them two sometimes three high, seeking new results. We waited patiently. A quiet day made it possible to hear the roar of the train whistle from miles away filling our hearts with excitement and anticipation. The train zinged by, sending the coins whizzing through the air. Scavenging for the coins was my favorite part. It was important that I thought of how the shape of the coins had changed in order to spot them. If I just thought about them as regular quarters or nickels, then they would never be found.
When making, it is imperative to recognize habits and be in tune with decisions that guide the work in a particular direction. I do not try to predict the future.
Complete clarity in the conceptualization of a finished object becomes
uninteresting, resulting in inattentiveness and disengagement. Rather, I seek out a balance between chance and intent. Purposeful considerations are
challenged by spontaneous ones to provoke change. Embracing erratic
tendencies can lead to unpredictable, strange, and delightful occurrences that continuously redefine the work. A harmonious balance of “not knowing”,
material mastery, and constant innovation is where I hope to be. In a 2004 interview with ceramic sculptor, Ron Nagle, Nagle compares making music to making objects, "There's this ultimate groove that you're trying to serve, and you play to that, it's the same thing making stuff. It starts to show you where it wants to be, and you have no choice."1
1 Writer, Jesse Hamlin Chronicle Staff. "Ron Nagle, 'baron of sculptural intelligence,' works with the groove of small things." SFGate. January 16, 2004. Accessed March 27, 2017.
http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Ron-Nagle-baron-of-sculptural-intelligence- 2830307.php.
The Vessel
“As we live our lives we accumulate a fund of memory- traces based on our sensory experience.
These remain charged, it seems, with vestiges of the emotions which accompanied the original experiences. The overwhelming majority of those experiences belong within the realm of sensuous life, and may never reach the sphere of word formation or what are usually regarded as concepts at all. And yet they probably provide the essential continuum from which evolves everyone's sense of the world and consistent reality, everyone's understanding of what it means to exist, and are even the ultimate compost from which scientific abstractions spring.¨ - Philip Rawson2
I grew up around handmade ceramics. My father made sculptural vessels out of clay and was heavily influenced by artists such as Peter Voulkos, Paul Soldner and John Glick. Our cross country family vacations consisted of frequent stops at artist’s studios. I can remember being about six or seven years old splashing around in Paul Soldner’s hot tub and playing tag with my little sister outside Warren McKenzie’s studio while my parents contemplated which tea pot they wanted to buy. Whether I realized it or not, my respect for clay started young as my siblings and I learned the ways in which to properly handle ceramic ware through everyday use.
Ingrained deep within my very make up is this familiarity with the vessel. Exploring and understanding the methodologies employed to create vessel objects are directly in line with the significance that utilitarian ceramics has played in my life.
When I first started making clay objects, an obsessive interest in mastering the potter's wheel led to countless hours of skill building as I mimicked everything from historical to contemporary pottery forms. I carefully studied these objects for they became the conventions to which I measured technical progress and
2 Rawson, Philip. Ceramics. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
began to shape how I navigated through the possibilities of form and function.
Continuous making instilled a confidence in working with clay.
I poke and prod the vessel, often doing things I am not comfortable with. This can cause doubt and second guessing to occur. I accept this and presume forward anyway. Through the distortion of the familiar, I challenge and question modes of making along with the intractability of the vessel. The adaptation and reconfiguration of the vessel in my current practice happens through the “ringing out” of materials and processes, vessel form, history, and convention to extract something fresh. Every present decision remains in continuous dialog with
previous life experience. In this way, making becomes a collision of activity in the here and now, in the studio, and in history.
Within my work, one can draw parallels between historical as well as
contemporary pottery forms; paintings from the De Stijl, Surrealist, and Abstract Expressionist movements; the eclecticism of the Italian-based, design group Memphis; and the shock and awe surfaces, intimacy of scale and structures of works by Ken Price and Ron Nagle.
References to Memphis design can be found through the exotic use of surface and structure as well as a questioning of the conventions of ceramics that I have come to know. Through an intense laboring of surface and continuous
innovation within my practice, I fire and re-fire multiple times until a result with the
ability to lure and seduce is achieved, similar to the finish fetish surfaces of Ken Price. The humorous spin on the cup, employed by Ron Nagle, is concealed within the ways in which I disrupt and challenge the role that the vessel plays within my work.
Auxiliary additions of decorative items adorn adaptations of the ceramic vessel.
The metamorphosis of materials becomes the ornamental accessories that resonates throughout the work. Manifestations are captured in form as faceted chunks and viscous drips, specs, splashes and runs of colored glaze which are repetitively distributed about a structure.
The relationship between glaze and clay has evolved and transformed in many ways throughout the history of ceramics. The melting of glaze and the
virtuousness of clay, for me, have become a symbol of heat and melt. Within my work, the glaze chunk further investigates my interest in exploring the potential of the transmutation of ceramic materials through time and temperature. Naked clay forms adorned with solid chunks of faceted glaze, curiously reference the amount of material necessary to cover an entire vessel surface and promote a reinterpretation of a traditional glazed surface. Glaze layers, surfaces or skins have been upended, squished, cut, or compacted and the fate of these
decisions become manifest within a chunk or a wonderfully tactile glob or drip.
Approaching the wheel
Clay has a mind of its own: it is alive, it breathes, challenges, moves and responds. Clay is careful and wise, it is not reckless.
On the wheel, soft-malleable earth meets my wet hands. I listen to the hums, beats and ticks of the pottery-wheel, which is mechanical and powered by electricity.
My hands explore the sticky spinning lump of clay, fastened to the wheel head. I touch first, and think later. I do not expect thought to initiate good form. I am
patient, my hands are knowing, they help me remember, I trust them.
The clay is thorough, it scours and investigates the landscape of my hands, every nook and cranny, making sure to leave no spot unchartered. When an understanding occurs, and remembrance commences, form begins. This moment is new, it’s exceptional, exciting and fresh, never has this happened before. Although I have done this thousands of times, this time is different from the last, and to think it wasn’t would be a lie.
Stretching, twisting and contorting, I pull up the walls. I notice shapes that move in and out of recognition.
The material twirls and moves between my fingers, gracefully lurching in different directions as it slips and slides into place.
I hold my breath. I can't help it, like a trapeze artist preparing to leap from a platform, I attempt to steady myself. My focus shifts to breathing again, new breath, new direction, new volumes created. A void animates an interval of time. The interval being from breath to breath. The story being the decisions, collaborations, risks, failures and successes that were made along the way.
As profiles and volumes flip into shape, the clay's voice becomes louder and I listen closely. I do not try to see where it will go or what the next move will be.
Rather, I respond and follow, becoming an active participant in the acrobatic event of shape-making.
“You write down a paragraph or two describing several different subjects, creating a kind of ‘story ingredients’ list, I suppose, and then cut the sentences into four or five-word
sections; mix ’em up and reconnect them. You can get some pretty interesting idea combinations like this. You can use them as is or, if you have a craven need to not lose
control, bounce off these ideas and write whole new sections.” -David Bowie3
3 "SONGWRITING TIPS: Try David Bowie’s ‘cut-up’ method of writing lyrics." SONGWRITING: THE HIT FORMULA. August 24, 2016. Accessed March 26, 2017. https://thehitformula.com/2013/04/30/songwriting- tips-try-david-bowies-cut-up-method-of-writing-lyrics/.
Exhibition Statement Alchemy Juice
The truth will often make you laugh. Humor can lighten. Sometimes laughter is the best medicine.
My work takes apart the ceramic vessel and re-animates its constituent parts.
Vestiges of utilitarian ceramics are free to perform as comic objects frozen in acrobatic recombination. The proper anatomy of the vessel is let loose and the assembled parts slip along viscous saturations of colored glaze.
My interest in the transmutation of materials propels my adventure with alchemy.
I am drawn to the theatrical. Drama invites exciting, emotional, and unexpected circumstances. This work references excessive behavior.
I integrate the pedestal as a stage. My objects sit and perform. Display animates this theater. Elevated tension, delicate balance, and hyperbole are the tools I use to activate the work. These objects entertain and charm as they dance with light and shadow. They flirt with gravity in curious ways.
Precariously stacked forms display
gyroscopic tendencies and reveal a
heightened awareness and a sense of
wonder.
Lush, generous surfaces seductively stimulate the senses. Handles bounce and coil like Slinky’s and thin-walled cylinders deform into pyroclastic flows that emulate flaccid, sagging body parts.
I incorporate ceramic materials’ uncanny ability to mimic the familiar. Thick slices of juicy orange glaze operate as household sponges. Hearty drips fall like melted Velveeta. Luminous greens resemble Laffy Taffy.
I search for the extension of an experience. Through a duration of engagement, I seduce the viewer or myself into thinking we have discovered something new. I poke and prod the vessel, often doing things I am not comfortable with. Through the distortion of the familiar, I challenge and question modes of making along with the intractability of the vessel. The adaptation and reconfiguration of the vessel in my current practice happens through the “ringing out” of materials and processes, vessel form, history, and convention to extract something fresh.
Images
Technical Statement
Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article the length you want to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you.
And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.
-Tristan Tzara, How to make a Dadaist Poem4
I collage together constituents of the utilitarian ceramic vessel. A cartooning of adaptations come together rather quickly, but may take many iterations until I am satisfied. This preferred exercise in my creative process of cutting up and reassembling, is similar to that of how one might go about songwriting.
The cut-up technique is an literary technique in which a text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text,5 and can be seen used by musicians such as;
David Bowie, Thom Yorke, David Byrne and Kurt Cobain. The lineage of the cut- up concept can be traced back to the early Avant-Garde movement, Dada and was further developed by painter, writer and sound poet Brion Gysin- and more popularized by radical and adventurous postmodernist author William S.
Burroughs in his controversial novel Naked Lunch.
I employ iterations of the cut-up technique to my repertoire of methodologies as
4 CPCW: The Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. Accessed May 04, 2017.
https://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/tzara.html.
5 "Cut-up technique." Wikipedia. March 21, 2017. Accessed March 26, 2017.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique.
a compositional tool as well as a way in which to find inspiration. Working this way provides the opportunity to construct and assemble arrangements that might not have been considered initially, while simultaneously finding and inventing solutions to technical and formal challenges. Searching for new and interesting connections between the anatomy of the vessel, keeps me engaged and excited, forcing me to remain observant for serendipitous moments that inevitably propel the work forward.
Glaze Casting
When deconstructing the anatomy of the vessel, it was important for me to think about each part separately. In this way of thinking, it was necessary to
implement a way of working with the glaze as an entity apart from the vessel.
After many failed attempts using plaster and sand, I decided to cast into soft brick molds, which allowed me to extract a solid form of glaze with the possibility to carve and sculpt. The molds consist of cut and altered soft bricks. The interiors of the molds are painted with kiln wash and a thin coat of studio wax. The kiln wash operates as a release and the wax becomes a barrier, preventing the glaze from absorbing into the porous soft brick. The molds were assembled and bound with wire, creating simple geometric negative spaces that liquid glaze would then be poured into.
Figure 1 Figure 2
Cut soft brick layed out for mold. Assembly of mold with kiln wash and wax layer.
Figure 3 Figure 4
glaze mold with liquid glaze Glaze cast and fired
Glaze Recipe
Stoney Matte Glaze- Cone 02 Frit 3124 66.9
Talc 6.3 Whiting 4 Calcined Kaolin 1.5 Flint 10.3 Nepheline Syenite 11 ---
+ Mason stain 10%
The original base recipe was take from Val Cushing’s A Potter's Handbook. A stone surface was desired. I worked on this glaze extensively to ensure minimal shrinkage and good separation from the mold surface when fired.
Kiln Wash Recipe Alumina Hydrate 50 EPK 50 ---
Apply an even coat. If applied too thick the wash will flake off into the glaze.
Wax
Regular studio wax. A thin coat was applied, then left to set up completely before pouring glaze.
Clay
When considering the clay bodies, I would work with, plasticity along with a variation in color and texture was explored. For me, it was important that the clay looked just as compelling wet as it did fired. I worked with three clays, a cone six red, cone five/six black and a cone ten porcelain clay.
Red Clay- cone 6 Red Art 40 Newman 20 OM4 Ball Clay 10 Custer Feldspar 10 Flint 20 ---
+ Medium grog to taste
Black Clay- cone 6 Newman 62.75 Barnard Substitute 22.55 Custer Feldspar 9.31 Flint 3.43 ---
+ Medium grog to taste
Porcelain- cone 10 Linda’s Porcelain Body Firing
Most of the firing took place within a range of cone 05 and cone 10 oxidation.
Glaze that was cast into molds required a higher firing temperature to insure the full fluxing of the material. Because the molds were made of soft brick, which naturally insulates, I needed to exceed the maturing temperature of cone 04, firing to cone 02 or 2014 degrees Fahrenheit and hold top temperature for twenty to thirty minutes depending on the mold size.
When the glaze was applied free from the mold and directly onto an object, a lower firing temperature was necessary, but this also varied upon desired results.
For example, If I intended for a glaze chunk to maintain its faceted geometry, but fuse to a clay form, I would fire to cone 06 ½ or 1830 degrees Fahrenheit. I would often use a small amount of glaze as an indicator of the melt, much like a cone pack. This allowed me to physically observe the status of the material and shut off the kiln or fire it longer if necessary. If a drip or run in which the original shape would be completely melted away was favored, I would fire to cone 05 ½ or 1900 degrees Fahrenheit, again observing a bit of glaze through the spy port to insure desired results. A range of firing temperatures allowed for a wide variety of different aesthetic considerations.
Bibliography
CPCW: The Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing. Accessed May 04, 2017. https://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/tzara.html.
"Cut-up technique." Wikipedia. March 21, 2017. Accessed March 26, 2017.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique.
"SONGWRITING TIPS: Try David Bowie’s ‘cut-up’ method of writing lyrics."
SONGWRITING: THE HIT FORMULA. August 24, 2016. Accessed March 26, 2017. https://thehitformula.com/2013/04/30/songwriting-tips-try-david- bowies-cut-up-method-of-writing-lyrics/.
Rawson, Philip. Ceramics. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014.
Writer, Jesse Hamlin Chronicle Staff. "Ron Nagle, 'baron of sculptural intelligence,' works with the groove of small things." SFGate. January 16, 2004. Accessed March 27, 2017. http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Ron-
Nagle-baron-of-sculptural-intelligence-2830307.php.
