Halkan Az Arany Üveg Mögött // Softly Behind the Amber Glass
Calling to memories of my grandparents’ Kádár-era home through using ordinary industrial material, reminiscent of the agricultural remains populating their village.
Using corrugated cardboard and chicken wire, I made an object that I preserved first in shellac, and then in a plaster cast. Using a slip casting method, the details were frozen in clay. After firing, and the loss of the cool, stone-wet quality of the clay, I burnished the material with beeswax.
The interaction of honey-sweet wax with the bone dry ceramic recreates the sense of ambiguous materiality inherent in the amber glass windows in my mother’s childhood home. The glass, both luminous and blurring, seemed to hold an otherworldly glow. A sense of silence, of whispers, of secrets, was always trapped behind its luster, tremulous, and yearning to break free.
Using an image of anonymous children found in Budapest, Hungary, a thread is drawn between my mother’s lived experience and the inner world of my own childhood. The children photographed during their play, are the same age as she was, the photo taken sometime during the 1960s, in a political climate still stifled by whispered words.
Made at the Penland School of Craft, guided by ceramicist Mathew McConnell.
9 x 10 x 1 inches
Burlap
Slip cast corrugated cardboard and burlap, burnished with beeswax after firing
Exploring ideas surrounding flags, belonging, and the material relationship of object to place.
7.5 x 9.5 x 1 inches
Repedés // Crack
Repedés a fák alatt
Régen láttam,
meg maradt
This turn of phrase, or words piled on one another, rang in my head for weeks, an unconscious mantra that seemed to speak from somewhere beyond. In my dreams during the weeks coming to making the object, I repeatedly saw images of a shining crack beneath a tree, bolstering and underscoring the words that knocked around again and again.
Through using ordinary corrugated cardboard, cut into the shapes of my own handwriting, I was able to create a sort of headstone to this memory. Encased in shellac, and then plaster, I was able to slip cast the paper in clay. Through beeswaxing the surface, a softness was reintrouced to the bone-brittle ceramic, a softening of both material and mind.
The chime of words with one another is often just as important as their meaning, like the crackle of branches in the underbrush...
Rokolya
Pleated cotton, preserved in plaster and slip-cast clay
Burnished with beeswax
Traditional Hungarian folk costume centers on the use of pleats to create shape and volume on the body, often exaggerating the lower half of the form. The rokolya is a heavily pleated and starched skirt, which I found myself thinking of while using a vintage pleating machine to create folds in fabric.