Last week, BoingBoing published a link to an article about a restaurant in Germany that will supposedly be catering to cannibals....and people who want to have parts of their bodies amputated (to feed said cannibals). There's speculation about whether or not the whole thing is a hoax or publicity stunt, but that's neither here nor there for me.
More importantly, I was drawn to BoingBoing's illustration, which was the ivory statue that you see above. It's by a 17th Century German sculptor named Leonhard Kern. Kern oversaw his own large sculpture studio that specialized in small-scale devotional figures. The above gem can be found in the Wikipedia commons..... and can be found in the real world (don't Second-Lifers call it "meatspace"?) at the Württembergisches Landesmuseum Stuttgart.
I was in Portland a few weeks ago to work on a show that I'm curating at the Museum of Contemporary Craft. While I was there, I ran into my dear friend Liz, who I hadn't seen since she had gotten engaged last spring. I knew all about the engagement--she and her beau, Matt are a perfect couple--but I hadn't heard about her AMAZING ENGAGEMENT RING!
The ring is a pretty jaw-dropping work of extreme craft. It sports the biggest cubic zirconium the couple could afford (that's a lot of cubic zirconium!) set in silver by Portland jeweler Colin Kippen. Kippen's rings are typically understated affairs that draw their inspiration from volcanic rocks and craggy stones, but this one marries (sorry, bad pun intended) his aesthetic to the world of big bling.
I love this image of the ring as Matt presented it to Liz--this is the wax model before it was cast in silver.
Here's the ring on the finger of the bride-to-be, along with a matching band that helps support the massive ring on Liz's finger (and stands in for the big kahuna when she needs to get her hands dirty in the studio). Once again, I love the matching of the handmade aesthetic with the gigantic, bloodless "diamond". A marriage made in heaven, just like Liz and Matt's.
Ah, the life of an accident-prone pottery lover. My wife and I have never met a piece of ceramic art that we couldn't find some way to destroy. We also live in an active fault zone--Eureka had a 6.5 earthquake last year that destroyed a lot of our ceramics. We're a mosaic artist's dream.
The Japanese have other ways of dealing with their broken ceramics.....in fact, they've elevated it to a high art. I've known about kintsugi for a long time. It's the art of repairing cracked or broken ceramics, and rather than attempting to hide the mends, the mender accentuates them with real gold or silver. I've seen plenty of images of old master tea bowls over the years, but I never knew exactly what the process was... until now.
My friend Becky just called my attention to the fabulous YouTube video above, which was put up by a Japanese metalsmith/jeweler. Apparently, the process is all based on resins and lacquers that come from trees. The kintsugi artist carefully repairs the broken vessel with a sticky resin that hardens as it dries. The resin can then be sanded and buffed until the crack is almost imperceptible to the touch. After that, the artist takes a lacquer that has been combined with real gold and covers the crack.
This can play out two ways. If you're repairing a stately piece of celadon or other fine porcelain, the craggy gold lines add a wildness and life that the piece didn't necessarily have in the first place. On the other hand, if you're repairing a rustic wood-fired shigaraki teabowl, the gold repairs become little bits of refined order that balance out the wildness of the original form.
When I think of how disposable everything in our culture is, my mind reels at thinking of a process that renders something thought to be useless into a piece of art that is more valuable than the piece was before breaking.
Kintsugi is so important that certain people have been known to intentionally destroy ceramic objects so they can be beautifully repaired. I'm kicking myself that I missed the exhibition that the Freer Gallery at the Smithsonian hosted last year. It was called "Golden Seams: The Japanese Art of Mending Ceramics". The show traced the history of kintsugi to 15th Century Japan, when a prized teabowl that belonged to a nobleman was broken. The teabowl was sent to China, where the finest porcelain wizards in the world plied their craft. The family was shocked when the teabowl came back "repaired" by large metal staples that held the pieces together. This led the Japanese to develop kintsugi within the next half-century.
Kintsugi is a demanding art to learn. It involves hard-to-come-by materials, a steady hand and a lot of patience. If any of you have the ear of the folks who make SuperGlue (or even duct tape), you should plead with them to develop a 21st century equivalent....before the next major earthquake hits my house.
I was chatting with Kate from the Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh yesterday, and she mentioned that she had read my entry about the Ndomikong Suh Subway sandwich sculpture. She mentioned that she had seen a report about the above butter sculpture at the Ohio State Fair featuring Joe Thomas from the Browns and Chinedum Ndukwe from the Bengals.
The kicker? The whole 500+ pound butter sculpture is part of a campaign to get kids to lead a healthier lifestyle. That's fitness I can get behind!
Oh man. Football season is just around the corner. I just ran into this wacky video of an artist constructing busts of Nebraska's own Ndamukong Suh and Clemson's C.J. Spiller out of Subway sandwich fixins. Love the baked bread pads and olive hair. Gotta carbo load for Fall camp!
Tanned, rested and ready.....well not really, but it's been a helluva summer so far. I apologize for the unintentional lapse in Extreme Craft.... I left the country on June 1st for a five-week residency at the Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, China. My internet connection wasn't playing nice, so I luxuriated in my unconnectedness. Claire and I got back on July 15th, then headed to the East Coast and Midwest to visit friends and family a few days later.
I just got back to our home base, and I'm trying to make my way through the backlog of things that I want to share with you, including a ton of photos taken in China, including the World Expo in Shanghai, which reduced my brain to a bubbling pile of goo on the fresh asphalt.
One of the best things to hit my inbox during Extreme Craft's summer vacation was this "Wurstkoffer" (sausage carrying-case) that my friend Astrid sent me from Germany. I managed to miss this during its first go-round on the internets a couple of years ago, and I figured you might have, too. Enjoy...and fire up your BBQ while there is still some summer left. Vegans--send me your best tofukoffer image.
I just ran into this photo of some fabulous duct-tape surgery that was conducted on the costume boots of Paul Stanley of Kiss. Kudos to Gil Kaufman for snapping this candid photo. Way to man up and problem solve, Star Child!
This body of work was created during a Summer 2010 residency at the Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, China. These porcelain vessels explore traditional Chinese iconography as refracted through a decidedly Western point of view.
