Description
Throughout the spring and summer I was picking up plants that I found to be representative of the feeling of that time of year. This is the only one of those vases that has survived its trip to the kiln and through raging 1200 degree fire. The sides are impressed with wheat taken from a field on a late summer day in August while cycling through the Skåne landscape on the way from one beach to the next.
A local clay was used to build this vase that I have collected on my bike, filtered and processed myself. There is no glaze applied to the outside of the kiln, but there is on the inside. The glaze is also made from local clay, ash and some silica. It has been fired for 24 hours in the second firing of my third attempt to build a wood kiln. This firing was the most successful yet, but there was still quite a high failure rate and room to improve!
I wrote a poem on the bottom. Old Chinese teapot inscriptions have inspired me to write poems on these plant vases as a way to further express my mood and feeling of that fleeting moment of time. Unfortunately most of them have cracked or unzipped at the seams at various points in the making process. It makes this, the final vase I made in the series, all the more special. I hope you can also feel the energy of the sun which has created the wood for the fire, the energy for the wheat and the plants for me to eat in order to create this piece from 150 million year old clay.
Sandy waves
lapping against
green combine
power from the sun
