Wednesday, January 02, 2008

Golden Creatures


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When i'm not busy ranting, i'm busy turning things golden. I've just taken a whole bunch of photos of my little golden creations and uploaded them onto Flickr, in preparation for phase one of CamillaStacey.etsy.com (coming on Saturday). I make a glib comment about them that I just 'make things go gold', but in reality there's much more to it than just a matter of changing colour.

On the one hand there's the actual physical process, using a gold lustre glaze, which is painted onto found ceramic objects by hand and then fired in a kiln; and on the other hand there is the thought behind the process.

I talked a little about this at the informal 'lecture' that took place at the opening of the exhibition in November, and it's something I need to keep coming back to and examining for myself, because I do think that I run the risk of just making things gold for the sake of it if I don't keep thinking about what I'm doing.


Each piece is unique, I spend my spare time hunting for these pieces in a quest to make them precious again. I am fascinated by the way that objects gain and lose meaning and importance throughout their lives, and by re-glazing them all with a uniform gold lustre I aim to make them special again. I love the fact that some of the objects I use are essentially junk before I glaze them, whilst others are high quality ceramics that I run the risk of devaluing by re-glazing them- under my glaze everything becomes unified and has the same value.

This is very much a work in progress, I find it hard to articulate the reasons for some of the things I do, so i'm sure i'll be revisiting this again and again over the next year.


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