DELFTS BLAUW STORIES
DELFTS BLAUW STORIES
An exhibition of the month-long residency Write@EKWC at the invitation of Watershed
I held the cigarette in my hands trying to hold a second. Chatter was surrounding me and I wanted to see if there was silence in the midst. I got entranced by the way the smoke was moving and She turned to me to ask what I was doing. I said, the smoke, with its seductive lines and sensuous waves, was being beautiful. I thought about how painters or other craftsmen reflect such movement without impaling their bodies onto wood, concrete, plastic. And I got jealous. But, as I was about to remark on the superiority of visual artists, She said, “like a dancer.” And I thought, could they be watching with the same admiration as I have them? And so, I breathed in the beauty of the dancing smoke more than I inhaled its carcinogenic fumes. I let the vapor perform in the stark blue light instead of only in my lungs. And I was now a choreographer of air.
- From “Monday-Monday”
The significance of “Delfts Blauw Stories” starts with some of my interests/questions - observance of land, power, antiquity, and embodiment - and how they operate here in the “Little Kingdom by the Sea”. I sought to take on a classic totem of the nation, its tiles, and support, supplant, distort, and re-color them. It was massive fun to create in the porcelain/pressed mold tradition, then create images with fidelity to and against delfts blauw (interestingly being the rich terracotta of more Southern countries). The photographs and media I also created are themselves embodied tile, investigating the way stoic blue mixes with terracotta skin.
This experiment was ultimately prompted by my invitation from Watershed, an organization for writers. Their encouragement to seek play within EKWC, a preeminent space for ceramic and clay workers, led me to excavate a deeper idea of exchange, resulting in text (“Monday - Monday”), movement scores (looped video), and soundscapes (“A Soundscape”) that were created from experiences within the studio. In the same way the formal tiles were a product of advisement and time among other craftsmen, the words and art are other relics and totems of time shared, of influence.
They, hosted here, reflect what many of us already know, which is that the immaterial feeling of sharing space, of welcoming, has the same indelible imprint as stone.