Potty

I've been promising myself for ages that when I stopped working I would do pottery classes, and this week I've come through with the goods.  Today I did my first beginners class at Perth Studio Potters, where I've been buying presents for years.    I wish I could say these were the fruits of my labour, but are in fact a (small) selection of the items I have gifted to myself from PSP.

For peanuts you can buy beautiful handmade items from their gallery (open Saturday mornings), and now that I've had a go at making a bowl on the wheel, I can tell you the quality of their wares on sale are bloody outstanding for the price.

For over two hours I was completely absorbed in clay and tableware design, with not a thought to housewifery duties or other random pointless concerns.

But what did occur to me, was the complete mismatch between the amount of time absorbed by art, and relative financial value of its results.  In fact this is probably the whole point of most art and craft, is that there is no monetary value in the end product 99% of the time, just the enormous pleasure of the creative process, to be banked.    I won't be giving up my day job though....  er, if I had one.

Life sized miniature

Sarah Lucas is one of the new breed of hot British artists, of the kind usually admired in edgy East end galleries, dead animals in brine, etc. Not in a field in sleepy Suffolk. But here at Snape is one of my favourite pieces of art, "Perceval", a shire horse pulling a cart. It is made of bronze and apparently weighs about five tonnes.

Perceval is a kind of meta representation, an artistic pastiche,  as it is a life sized model of a something that is a miniature version of something real and big.  Make sense? Try again.  Once upon a time most mantelpieces in England groaned with china figurines: dogs, toby jugs and often shire horses.  Perceval is modelled on a ceramic ornament, except it is to full scale.  So clever.  The finish is applied so it looks just like glazed porcelain.

Lucas likes to comment on British culture, celebrating the everyday and commonplace.  I just wish my Yorkshire Grandad was still alive, I'd love to see what he made of it.  They had a whole room (the front room no one ever used) that was heaving with stuff like this.  The small scale models, not life sized sculptures, naturally.  Now that would have been cluttered.