If you have arrived at this blog through scanning a QR code it means you have received an edition of the lino print pictured here. This means you are also a fellow printmaker and participant in the 2012 La Calaca Press International Print Exchange. Welcome. If you are not a printmaker, this post is connected to the international print exchange and its printmaking exhibitions. All the work can be viewed at calacapress.blogspot.com which Carlos Barberena, printmaker and organiser of the print exchange maintains. The following post explains my interest in the promotion of printmaking and pottery between artists and craftspeople around the world.
Have you ever been introduced to the skeleton structure for
writing an essay? The skull is the introduction, detailing your topic. The
backbone and joints your argument, each limb having a function, an idea separate
yet connected to your topic. You are recommended to use sign post sentences, referring from the paragraph before leading to
the next – these, if you like are the connecting tissues and muscles. If the structure
is in place it allows your reader to move around the body of the story, presenting
a view of the whole picture.
This essay shares some thoughts and intentions I had for this
print interpreting Calacus, the theme of the international print exchange. The title
‘a skeleton of a story’ is miss leading, as I haven’t integrated an emblematic
skeleton, a symbol of the celebrations. Instead, I use its narrative to take
you beneath the soil to a possible resting place to search for evidence.
The skull in this
print is represented on a shard of pottery drawn from a gravestone. Calacus, the
day of the dead celebrates and remembers all our beloved deceased. In my case,
I celebrate the people who worked the Fife land generations before me. They were the work force that laboured and
lived off the land, creating our heritage from the soil beneath their feet. Fife is a rich and fertile area in the east
of Scotland, surrounded in part by the North Sea. I am interested in its
generous geological resource of red clay –earthenware is rich in muddy magic. Before
the industrialization in the 1800’s and early 1900s, potteries, tile and brick
works populated the area. Despite ample coal to fire the clay and water to ship
the results across oceans, none of this industry survives today.
The backbone of
the pottery industry even in good periods was not easy. Jim Bell quotes in his
book, ‘Nine potteries in Kirkcaldy’, an elderly employee laments to the cares and anxieties and sorrows of existence as a pottery. The
efforts of the makers who fashioned pots (often tea pots) would travel across
continents. As wages were cut, depressions hit and war loomed this lament was
heartfelt. Today I relish every ceramic
shard I find. Evidence of the past is treasure on our shore, in our garden and ploughed
free in a field. I began collecting families of fragments as a thoughtless act,
as I meandered along the beach. The blue and white coloured china would leap
out from the tidal spills of plastic, seaweed, and shells. The pieces of brown
earthenware with yellowing slip are fast becoming a favourite, since a neighbour’s
child pronounced them just like bites of buttered toast!
The limbs. It is
fitting that this print exchange disseminates with outstretched arms, the
creative work of printmakers around the globe, like the ceramic pots travelled a
few hundred years before. Kathleen Jamie a Scottish nature writer and poet describes
her journey into archaeology through her appreciation of two bronze age clay
bowls in her book Sightlines. She describes
the 4000yr old bowls discovered 100yrs apart in two different areas of Scotland.
The bowls are believed to have been made by the same potter; due to their
almost identical markings She calls them siblings.
Maybe when we are all reduced to bones ourselves, we will also be museum
matched as siblings; or our prints, with their synchronizing scale, marks and
story.
The legs, they help
us travel as the potter searching for clay. The potter in this print is a 21st
century prospector searching for the quiet location of almost forgotten clay
deposits. Time is deep and memories are buried;
however a few still know where the clay hides. His quest is guided on this occasion;
he is tipped off to a costal location. In guerrilla mode there is no need to
dig only to gather clay from a landslide on a local beach. Climbing through
scree, pointing at the strata of the rocks, evidence of ancestors in the lines
of seashells beneath the topsoil, he sees a geological view of our land exposed.
Naked like a skeleton, its clothing of turf and wild flowers have slipped off
like a coat on a warm day.
The fragments of ceramic in this print show the chips,
cracks and crazes, trademarks of the materiality of pottery. The journey associates pottery emerging from
all the other bits of life that find their way from land to sea and back again.
I imagine a full life lived from each piece of pot. The snippets of story are fascinating because they
are incomplete. I might label each found
fragment like those I see in museum archives.
My relics will have ambiguous notation e.g. “Sandy: plot 2 -Kirkcaldy”; “Rain:
Pittormie-Past the rhubarb; “You can not miss it: Cheddar cheese-Clettie!”
These earth mysteries need only ever be skeletons of stories.
They do not require fleshing out- the magic is their mystery. This print is a quiet
impression and acknowledgment to all those that have lived and crafted lives in
a ceramic tradition. It is also a greeting to all of you who have small boxes
of treasured objects, fragments of any description that make you imagine a time
and connection with others.
