Mon, 26 Mar 2012 16:45:41 -0800WeeblyMon, 28 Jun 2010 01:56:10 -0800http://catebourke.weebly.com/1/post/2010/06/1.htmlhttp://www.diylife.com/2010/06/14/summer-maintenance-check-for-termite-damage/?sms_ss=facebook

Amazing browns, siennas, umbers, sand, grain, and textures in these termite works.]]>Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:21:41 -0800http://catebourke.weebly.com/1/post/2010/06/post-title-click-and-type-to-edit.htmlWhat's around me disappears when I do art and there is only the good work in front of me.

I am keeping tools at hand at home and creating texture, detail on closed clay forms I can hold in my hand after having looked at photomicroscopic images of pollen, reproducing pollen grains macroscopically. I'm told lots of potters are looking at these images; pollen begs to be represented in clay. The result is something primitive that resonates within human beings.

In the studio there are the tea party pots. I'm piecing the work together with thrown and extruded elements, fleshing out ideas as well as trying to think out surface details as they relate to concept/content.

I am negotiating buying a van or a trailer to take up residency on the road, installing work in communities across the northeast, setting up local panels and talks, schlepping and traipsing. Along with ample studio time, maybe some work in the schools, it's a partial living. What I've done of it, I like.

All plans don't come to fruition. Bad timing, lack of knowledge, of a support system, lack of purpose or will or heart, too much (!) or not enough creativity are some of the pitfalls that can correlate/intersect with, detract from and/or enhance  plans. I have enough experience to know I won't get everything I want and simultaneously how fortunate I am. ]]>Thu, 24 Jun 2010 21:36:56 -0800http://catebourke.weebly.com/1/post/2010/06/teapots.htmlThe pleasure of making teapots with ample bellies, well fitting spouts, apt handles, deep seated lids. Lovely. The concave press to construct a tea strainer against the resistance of a leather hard body. Over the course of nearly 20 years as a potter, I've never had any desire to create teapots before.

I decide I'll ask poet friends and acquaintances to collaborate, and share with me tea poems they've written or known, words I can apply to the surfaces of pots and cups and tea trays. It's my cynical tendencies--the tea party movement and, as I read tea's history, the imperialist Opium Wars, for example, i.e., palpable fear and degradation, that inspire me initially to take on this series. Yet, now that I'm in, it's the simple and surprising beauty of the process that I want to allow.


Surface 1: Tea with Wallace Stevens]]>Sat, 19 Jun 2010 18:18:31 -0800http://catebourke.weebly.com/1/post/2010/06/social-sculpture.htmlI begin new work on a series inspired by a quip by Peter Sagal on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me. Something to the effect of "Prettily dressed little girls and armed militia are showing up at the same tea parties." The work will involve tea service, with multiple forms and surfaces to comment on civility, ceremony, imperialism, hospitality, health, etc. The quintessential potter's challenge, the teapot, throwing itself into the social sculpture fray. The artist's talk to close the exhibit? A tea party with tea poured from the (socially) constructed art forms.

While sitting in the Hartford Public Library this afternoon, tapping my foot to the live music of a marimba band during the festivities held there in honor of International Refugee Day, I find a tea poem by Wallace Stevens, Hartford's amazing poet of simultaneous certainty and contradiction. He writes:

Tea at The Palaz of Hoon

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.]]>