An architectural detour

I had two research plans for coming to Rio: The first one was to learn more about Neoconcretismo (Neo-concretist art, such as Helio Oiticica and Lygia Clark's work) and about contemporary artist who follow in their footsteps in exploring logical—almost mathematical—constructed systems in experiential and bodily ways. 

The second research plan was to look at architecture, especially 20th century modernist architecture. For the past years, I've been making miniature sculptures that started out as nothing more but studies in structural composition but became increasingly inspired by real and imaginary architectures. I've been fixated on 50's architecture in Brazil since watching Flores Raras (Reaching for the Moon), dir. Bruno Barreto.

Panorama from Parque das Ruinas in Santa Teresa. Click on the photo to make it larger.

A quick look down at the metropolis from any of it's high-perched observation points reveals a sea of drab concrete blocks, dotted with red tile roofs, occasional romantic cupolas, squares of green parks and tight vertical patchworks of raw masonry and intense wallpaint color in the favelas.

Rio was discovered on January 1st, 1502 by Portuguese sailor Gaspar de Lemos, who gave it the name, River of January. It did not get settled by the Portugal until 1555 due to turf wars between the native Tamoimo, the French and Portuguese. Jesuits arrived in waves followed by other religious orders, such as the Franciscans, and by the 17th century, Rio was established as the 3rd biggest settlement in Brazil. Millions of slaves from Africa were brought to provide labor for sugar cane plantations and in the newly discovered gold and diamond mines in Minas Gerais, making Brazil the largest of slave holding nations. For rough comparison: Between the 16th and 19th century, North America imported about 600 thousand, while Brazil took almost 5 million people from Africa as forced labor. The turning point in the development of Rio came in the early 1800's when the Portuguese regent prince, Dom João VI, fleeing from Napoleon set up his court in Rio. He eventually became the king of Portugal but being in love with Rio so much, created an exception and ruled from the Colony. The 19th century brought new waves of immigrants not only from Europe but also resulting from internal displacement: veterans from the civil wars, rural population and former slaves from the failed sugar and coffee plantations and from the exhausted mines all came to seek new prospect in the rapidly expanding city. Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery, in 1888.  These poor migrant laborers finally set up camp on the steep mountain sides creating somewhat isolated and, as such, autonomous enclaves under extremely rough conditions – this was the birth of favelas.

In the early 1900's Rio continued to expand and modernize, resulting in large scale urban projects such as the expansion to Copacabana. These moves were not trivial: because of the scalloped shoreline and dozens of small mountains that dot the landscape, each expansion required a tunnel or landfill. Early maps reveal a disjointed urban fabric, and this is still true today both geographically and economically. While the government moved to Brasília in 1960, the mid-century saw an even more intense architectural program lead by star architects, such as Oscar Niemeyer, Lucio Costa, Roberto Burle Max, and Affonso Eduardo Reidy. During this time, interior migration to favelas has also intensified resulting in a total of 763 such enclaves by 2011 with an estimated 1.8 million people living in them (that is almost 1 in every 4 people in Rio de Janeiro).

This history shows up everywhere:

Convento de Santo Antônio is the earliest Franciscan convent. In its original form it was completed in 1620. Behind it, the headquarters of Petrogas, Brazil's oil monopoly. 

Convento de Santo Antônio is actually 3 different churches built in different styles in different centuries, including the most lavish baroque one, Igreja da Ordem Terceira de São Francisco da Penitência.  

View of Centro from Santa Teresa. The main landmarks include Aqueduto da Carioca or also called Aqueduto da Lapa (Lapa aqueduct, built in the middle of the 18th century to bring fresh water from the Carioca river to the city. To the left of the aqueduct is the stunning Catedral Metropolitana de São Sebastião (Metropolitan Cathedral of Rio de Janeiro) designed by Edgar Fonseca, finished in 1979.

Street view of colonial mansions in the Santa Teresa neighborhood. This street used to have a quaint old tram that climbed from the bottom to the top of the hill through Santa Teresa's windy streets.

Street in Santa Teresa. Not obvious from the photo but there are 4 levels of streets in this spot. Each is accessible with a flight of stairs cut directly into the walls (no handrails). Many of the colonial building are in the state of severe disrepair.

Street in Glória, close to Lapa. The city lives on many levels. 

Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (MAM). Located in Flamengo Park, which was one of the mid-century urban planning projects. Flamengo Park was envisioned by landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx with Lota de Macedo Soares, whose life story made the film, Flores Raras. The Modernist concrete museum building, designed by Affonso Eduardo Reidy was completed in 1955.

Interior staircase of the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro. I'm fascinated by this building's perfectly cast elegant staircases. 

Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói or MAC (Niterói Contemporary Art Museum) is situated across the bay, in the city of Niterói, Rio de Janeiro. It was designed by Oscar Niemeyer and completed in 1996.

The spiraling walkway that leads up to the entrance is painted red.

The shape is so lovely, makes me think of a Lucie Rie ceramic vessel more than a UFO or a spindle (as the bus driver described it to me with wild hand-gestures).

One of the fancier apartment buildings by the Lagoa (lagoon) in upper middle-class Gavea. 

Nicer apartment buildings overlooking the Lagoa on the Ipanema side. On top of the mountain is a scrappy looking concrete monolith. As often is the case, it goes unnamed on the Google map, so I could not figure out what it was. I'm guessing it may be a government (police or military) complex, a school or community center located on the edge of the Cantagalo favela of Copacabana. 

This graffiti is on an abandoned building near the ferry terminal in Niteroi. The signage translates: "50 years of military coup" and "Remember and Resist". 

This is one of the most upscale neighborhoods, a fancy street in Leblon. From the buildings to the landscaping, everything is well kept, clean and maintained in a sparkly state. The street is empty, scrubbed clean. The trees have orchids growing on them.
So different from the rest of Rio!
Even in middle class neighborhoods such us ours, while the streets are litter free for the most part, there is so much disrepair,  broken sidewalks, cheap useless fixes, stench of excrement (with no actual excrement in sight), and a large number of homeless sleeping and living everywhere. 

The good-byes

The final week has come and gone. I'm writing these last few posts on the plane to Seattle and uploading them from home.
The frenzy of finishing my project, packing the work, and exiting the program lasted with intensity into the final day. By Friday noon, I had everything that I made, along with my molds and tools packed and paletted at the loading dock in the factory, and we watched it being put on a truck to start its journey to Seattle.

Everything I made is boxed up and ready to put on palettes for shipping.  40 boxes, 1790 lbs. total weight

I cleaned out the studio for the next resident and, on my way out, disposed of the safety glasses and the "clown shoes" (clumsy, heavy, steel toed work shoes) that we all have to wear at all times in the factory. My badge expired at 5pm and, after that, I could no longer enter the factory. The residency was over. "The Garden of Eden" is closed forever. Kind of a sad moment, especially considering that the factory was a home away from home for 13 long weeks. It has been a place in Kohler I was the most familiar with, where I was the most comfortable at, and where most of my social interactions took place.

Finally, exchanging these...

...for these

Going from a newbie who does not know anything or anybody, screws up, gets in the way, and generally clueless about the world of the factory, to be accepted and welcomed, showered with questions and silly stories, greeted by smiles and small talk every time I walked through the factory. Being addressed by various versions of my name (the idiosyncrasies of pronunciation of which I would always find entertaining, while being appreciative of the sincere effort) and being looked after by these rough and gruff men of heavy physical labor made the factory a very comfortable place. They joked on my vegetarianism and petite physique; fixed my bike; fed me from their lunchboxes; kept tabs on my comings and goings, on how much I worked and how little I rested; wanted to know what an artist does and how much money it makes (zero?!); what my life of university teaching was like; and how we "out there" in the state of Washington are doing in this bad economy.
I learned to love the factory, and to very much appreciate the workers and their lives.

In late November, I realized that a natural next step for me is a second but no less involved project that uses the same molds toward a different conceptual direction. One that directly addresses the laborers. When we talked, the associates often complained about their perception of the management who sits in their high ivory towers and of being treated by them not as individuals but as numbers and parts of a machine only designed to hit a certain quota of production.
Day after day in talking with these men, it became clear to me that the sluggish economy is an undertone of all these conversations. The labor that they do and the respect and pay that it receives are in the forefront, a concern for their families and for the negative health effects of the repetitive and heavy physical work are much on their minds.
The idea for the new project occurred to me in an instant: Taking beautiful portrait shots of the associates and accompanying them with pieces of these mold fragments that are personalized by using the graphics of the worker's favorite work shirt. I talked to them about the fact that the molds were tools being used for a while then discarded after no longer being found useful. I often wondered if they  understood this to be a metaphor the same way as I did, as an analogy of their own lives of physically consuming labor.

ceramics pins I made as good-bye presents for the associates

I was amazed when I got the go ahead Kohler (most of the factory can be red tape galore!) and then received the help to make the photo portion of this project possible. Getting it all organized in less then a week was no small effort, which required all the diplomatic skills and connections of the wonderful A/I program assistant, Cara Camp, and amazing pottery technician, Shari McWilliams. Out of the 16 workers I asked to let me take their pictures, most obliged and we took the photos in two sessions on the week before my final week of residency. Two photographers helped me to make it possible, Brad Allen, of Kohler, and Jeff Machtig of the John Michael Kohler Arts Center.

one of the casters, Jerry in his (and my) favorite T-shirt

and the same graphics inlaid with color slip on the piece

Each associate posed somewhere around his own work area. The poses reveal powerful and manly characters while the actual photo-shoot  will always be memorable for me for the awkward exposure and intimate momentary connection created by being stuck on either side of the camera's lens while the shutter opened.
I only had time to make one test piece, out of one of these photographs (see above). I would need months of testing and execution to develop the work into what I imagined in my head.
 For that, I would have to come back to Kohler sometime soon, or attempt to finish the project by holding on to the initial inspiration at home.

biking home from the factory in early December with the sunset in my back

Repetition

Repetition is in the heart of casting, while repeatability is the cornerstone of any manufacturing process.
Days and weeks blur together during art residencies, losing the track of time completely. Much happens during a workday, sometimes by mid-afternoon it feels like I've lived three full days since the morning.

But much of every day is a returning pattern of getting up, biking to the factory, casting, glazing, cleaning, assembling, moving, finding people to do some kind of specialized task for me, (one of the perks of the factory is the experts crew of workers doing spraying, epoxying, finishing work etc. who would often times help out with things like covering the large surfaces of my pedestals evenly with glaze, fixing pinholes and glaze faults after the firing, or would cut fired ware with a diamond blade to the size and shape I need), having it done, loading or unloading the kilns, more glazing, more loading and unloading and finally biking home to crash for a few hours in the horizontal position until the alarm goes off.
On, and on, and on...

One of the side projects is this large tile with a pattern made with hundreds of barcodes I had fished out of a dumpster (work in progress. the yellow color is that of the plastic film of the barcode decal)

In the final two weeks of the residency this pattern seemed to be on a fast forward. I completely divorced from the circadian pattern and set on a pattern of kilns firing up and cooling down. I would leave the factory at 3am or 5am regularly, returning again at the start of the workday (9am). On one occasion, on the final week, I left at midnight to take a quick nap at the house, then went back to the factory to get something out of the kiln at 3am, which I glazed with gold luster until 9am so that I can pop it back for the next round of firing. Then I stayed on working for an entire day, leaving again at 11pm exhausted to the point of not remembering where I left my bike when coming in.

The nature of my projects dictate a certain kind of repetitiveness too. For the installation, I wanted to create as many pieces as I possibly could, resulting in a series of processes done over and over. However, as much as I had expected the final weeks to be repetitive and predictable to the point of boredom, the numerous side projects I had started but haven't yet finished, and the new ideas for pieces to add to the installation that seemed to uncontrollably flow out of me in the last minute created a welcome break from the predictability (but added to the burden of multitasking).

hospital ware molds on the casting floor adjacent to the A/I studios. look at these perfectly organized rows of molds

the same great form, but each mold has a different personality that is only known to the caster working with these molds

casting cones

The casting floor is a striking visual environment full of repetition. I finally managed to take some images (see above and below)  and got an OK on using them in my artist lectures. Whether it is the gigantic molds laid out in neat rows, or greenware on the conveyer belt, or the casting cones stacked on their racks (plastic cones to be inserted into the pour holes on the molds to store extra slip in order to create a positive pressure in the mold), this visual repetition is seductive to me and my artwork and aesthetic sensibility clearly reflects this fact.
The repetitiveness in the making process or daily routine and the repetition in a visual pattern is attractive for the same reason: There is a promise of organization with a hint of chaos. There is a huge seductive power to the organized pattern that is almost, but not completely, the same throughout. Small distractions, misalignments, and flaws make the uniformity of pattern even more obvious and the tension between the perfect and the almost perfect both jarring and irresistible.

more cones on the rack

more repetition of molds and finished casts  (the ware from the previous day is drying slowly under the shrouds. what was cast today is still in the molds)

Colors of Autumn

After 2 weeks of stormy, windy and drenching weather an Indian summer is treating us all in Kohler with sunshine and warmth. The trees of the factory yard are turning color: intense hues of red, orange and yellow against the bright blue sky. During work hours, the warm weather is not a blessing though. Fans, heaters and humidifiers keep the casting room at a constant 80 degrees temperature, from which the only relief is to find a spot next to a slightly open window. On these warm days of late autumn, the air inside does not move and it's a numbing sweaty experience.
Funny side note: we had a group of distinguished guests visiting this week. By the time they were through with the factory tour and arrived to our studios for the "much awaited" visit and demo, most of the ladies decided that the heat and dust was too unbearable for them and took their leave.

Before I go on, I have to introduce my new studio and house mate, Mr Tom Spleth of North Carolina. Tom is a distinguished artist of many talents, and an seasoned mold maker. He came here to do color and got me swept up in experimenting with colored clay bodies.
Technical note: It is possible to put ceramic pigments directly into clay resulting in intense colors when fired. The advantage of this is that the piece does not need a glaze, the color is already incorporated into the form. For a studio artist, it's an expensive way of working but at Kohler there are available resources. 
Tom does a very interesting technique for getting a pattern onto his large vase forms: He pours colored slip on his disassembled mold parts so that the casting surfaces are covered with drippy dynamic lines, then he assembles the mold and fills with the regular slip to make a cast of the form.

Tom Spleth developing a new form by pouring plaster on the form then scraping and piling tall...

...there are many more steps to go but the form is starting to take shape.

On his first day at Kohler as I was describing my project to Tom, I realized that with all the delicate textures on my forms, glazing may not be the way to go. Kohler glazes are thick and meant to cover, they tend to make surface details disappear (see previous posts). What I wanted to do in the first place was contrasting surfaces of bone-like dry unglazed clay and high gloss glaze, white with a touch of a pink blush. After many disappointing results on test tiles and our conversation, it was easy to convince me to be sneaking up to the glaze lab and mixing bucket after bucket of color slips for "experiments".
So, the week started out with the promise of playful colors of blues, yellows, greens, as well as more somber grays and black.
Color made my casting process more complicated. I decided to do a double layer wall: by pouring the colored slip in and immediately pouring it out, I could get a skim coat of color to stick to the mold walls first. Then this is followed by pouring in regular slip in order to make a structural wall. This process means rotating the mold one additional time while a jelly-like thickening veil of slip if clinging to the mold wall on the inside.

the molds being filled with casting slip (on the cart in the back is the "library of forms" - the chunks of broken industrial molds that I would like to make molds of)

With every complication in the process you take more chances. And so it happened that I had to face the fact that there is a certain percentage of error in this process. Molds would blow up leaking slip all over the floor (this actually has nothing to do with color but a lot with the fact the the thick rubber bands that I use for strapping the molds together unexpectedly relax over time). The walls of the fresh cast would occasionally collapse together, making a sad deflated mess out of the form.  Working with so many colors all at once, it was also harder to fix cracks and flaws.
I tried to comfort myself with the fact that these losses were minimal and to gather enthusiasm by describing the potential with these colors to the factory tour groups that come around in the mornings.
Except, that I should have known better: I'm not really interested in getting a variety of colors. My pursuit is pink blush against pristine white. I don't know why. But I needed to get it.

And then my luck turned: I got into the spraybooth one night with all my pieces and started spraying glaze. I tried to be calculated and layer what in the tests had given me the best indication of some sort of pink... But then I got carried away (or went rouge?, or got greedy?). In addition to my own test glazes, I also scavenged some of the production glazes and at that point continued spraying with an abandon: thick coats for the smooth parts of the form and thin for the textures, layer after layer of a quick puff of color.

I put them in the kiln with dread the next morning. It's not enough that I went crazy with the glaze and could not even remember what I put on any of the pieces. But they may as well stick to the kilnshelf for good, or explode, or fall over in the kiln.
A necessary technical side note here: The firings are done in the factory's main tunnel kiln. This is a kiln that runs the entire length of the floor: could be as long as 300m  or more (I should really find out). Ceramic ware travels in it on a cars that run on a track kind of like a freight train. Each car has shelving set up to place the sinks, urinals and toilets. As ceramics travel further down the tunnel the gas burners pump in more and more heat, by the middle of the tunnel reaching cone 10, around 2300 degrees F.
When loading the kiln at Kohler, I have to make room on the shelf without interfering much with the loaders' work and the production schedule.  Carefully placing 22 little pieces with no flat bottoms while the car keeps jerking forward was an anxiety filled event to say the least. A good reminder that I have to plan for efficiency for the next round. But everything was on the shelf at last and my pieces went off on their scorching 27 hour journey.
They came out yesterday. When I went to rendezvous with them at the unloading station I could see from afar that all the guys were circling my cart grinning and pointing and probably making some jokes I rather not want to hear. What's really great is that they did not touch anything until I got there and then they handed me the setters with the pieces on. Wow!!! The late night rampage in the spraybooth was not all that crazy after all!  I got my pink blush, several different versions of it and I love it!!! It makes these clunky chunks of plaster forms look very feminine and sexy in a weird but not totally unexpected way. "Of course", - said Sandor, "you are making them, so even dumb chucks of plaster look bodily".

Dirt and Water

It's only the end of the second week and I've lost track of time already. The parameters of my project are taking a solid shape, and besides that, there are many smaller side projects I would love to pursue in the next 11 weeks. With every ceramics place I've visited as an artist in residence there come a set of opportunities and a set of limitations. At Kohler, these are materials and finishes allowed by the factory (I will probably discuss these in the weeks to come...) as well as technologies that fit into their very own industrial process. In other words, I'm going to have to use what fits within these limitations, and in turn, using what's available generates new ideas I would have never thought of otherwise. One of these creative cul-de-sacs is the limited production-line color palette. For my project, the main color finish I had in mind was a sexy hot pink blush in contrast to the sanitary white. The glaze tests came out this week, - looks like there will be no blushing. Similarly, the '70-es vividly "Bold look of Kohler" colors are no longer used in the factory due to lead silicate (a very common but, in unfired form, deadly ceramic ingredient). What's left is old-lady-pastels, and basic B&W. Comfortingly, these latter are thick and luscious.
To test the strength of the Kohler clay and methods for joining, I slapped a few little house of cards structures together last week. Against the odds they survived (everybody thought they were too flimsy and fragile) and became adorable little sculptures. So there is one enticing side-track already.

As for my main project:  
A reminder: I'm taking old, broken industrial molds, which look nothing more than chunks of plaster of an interesting shape now and will be remaking them in clay. See previous post.
This week, I've started making molds. Each plaster chunk is such a complex shape that it difficult to get away with molds less complicated than 5-6 pieces. It's not uncommon that certain shapes require 7-8 mold parts. When the tour groups come around, they are baffled by the sight of me playing with putting together a 3D jigsaw puzzle that seemingly requires more than the two hands I got. As a nice elderly lady revealed to me on Friday, even though I'd described the project, she and her friends did not understand what the plaster pieces are for until I started to put them together to show that the hollowness the moldparts enclose indeed gives the negative shape of the chunk of plaster I was showing earlier.

a 7-piece mold disassembled, with its positive (the slightly more yellow chunk)

the same mold assembled with its positive

This is really the first time for me for working on molds of this complexity, and in such a large numbers. Every day, I make one new mold, if I make it a long day (13 hours +) I can finish two of the easier ones. With this rate it will "only" take 2 months to make molds of all of the chunks I have. Nice!

the smallest chunk, it's complex enough that it still requires 5 parts

ready to pour part #2 with plaster

plaster in the cavity, 3 more parts to go

Having to make molds every day is not as dull as it seems: Some people do sudoku, mold making is my way of fighting off early dementia. Each mold is a new mental challenge of successfully breaking down the form to surfaces without undercuts.
Technical side-note: an undercut is a recess in the surface that does not allow the mold to be pulled away without breaking off some part. For example: your neck is an undercut relative to your head when taking of a sweater with a tight neckline. That is, unless you literally are a pinhead.
As a side-effect of the long hours of mold making, by the end of the day I look like I'm thoroughly dusted with powdered sugar (it's plaster, of course). With a deep trench on my cheeks from the edge of the respirator digging into it. Factory issued steel-toed boots caked with plaster. Ceramics is a DIRTY business!

And here comes the part about water:
- Oh, the waters of Kohler!!! As an artist in residence, I was offered a membership to the town's gym, Sports Core. Being used to the IMA at school, I was expecting utilitarian  facilities and crowds but was looking forward to resume weekly swimming at last. It turned out that I'm the only one using the 25m "competitive swimming pool" (that is the pool that has lanes and no babies with inflatable rubber duckies). I go to the pool nearly every day now after work. It's addictive. Floating in silence in the aqua blue rectangle looking out to the stars I feel like Juliette Binoche in Krzysztof Kieślowski's  Blue. (Rent it if you don't know what I'm talking about.) It's a weird thing to be alone in the entire swimming pool. No noises of splashing or staccatos of breathing. I can't get over how strange it feels.

sunset (in the factory)

At Sports Core, there is also a large outdoor Jacuzzi on the deck with a fireplace. The view is to the small lake, woods with songbirds, peachy-purple sunsets turning into the inky night sky. Unbelievably peaceful and beautiful. And to top it all, I must describe the shower in the dressing room: True to Kohler fashion, it features pretty much every type of showerhead that there is. There are 4 showerheads all together, in every stall. One for each third of the body + a handheld. Each with functions that can be set to massage or shower in any combination. Unlimited hot water with complementary fancy toiletries.  No signs of signs about conserving water and saving the planet. The do-gooder, earth-saver-Seattleite conscience cringes about the wastefulness of all this luxury but I can't resist the extensive shower ritual after the long and dirty day at the factory.

Geology can be fun

Thanks to the Baltic woodfire symposium organized by Cassius Clay, yesterday I went on a tour of the island lead by Jesper Larsen, to see evidences of Borholm's unique geology and ceramics history.

The island is cut through by a fault line from Ronne to Nexo separating the basalt rock of the north and the sandstone of the south. Around this central/southern area is where clay was discovered accidentally during repeated attempts of coal mining centuries ago. Oh, yes, there was coal (and also Jurassic fossils and dinosaur remains...) but every attempt to get it out of the ground failed commercially, partially because of pesky clay getting in the way. Finally, and because this isolated land was otherwise not at all fertile and, consequently, its population was very poor, pottery production started up as a means of economic survival. One-man potteries grew into small factories like the Hjorth Fabrik in Nexo we visited with the tour. Hjorth was one of the first workshops to develop wood-firing and stoneware bodies in Denmark. In their museum it has been an eclectic collection of pottery produced during the 200+ years, styles following international trends from Japonism to fajance (yes, they worked with earthenware for a while too). The bread and butter of the pottery was, of course, reliable and plain functional objects in solid yellows, browns, and black for the table, as well as apothecary jars. The workshop still has the old equipment (although most of it is just for show; - I'm pretty sure their clay now comes from the same place in plastic bags like the clay I use here does). Everything was very charming in a nostalgic yet claustrophobic way, as built spaces in Denmark tend to be very small. Seeing the workshop floor, a Japanese artist I was with was enthralled; while I tried to imagine my own sprawling studio practice cramped into this tiny space. On the tour, we also visited a now defunct mega-factory. Its location is still marked by what the kiln shed used to be: a 200 meter long roof structure (amazing timber construction, like an upside down boat!). This was a place for refractory production: ceramics for bricks, tiles, pavers, pipes, etc. A very high fired stoneware varying across the color spectrum from yellow to chocolate brown. The kilns were 70-80 meters long, rail tracks going into them, feeding clay 24/7. The factory was located right next to the stoneware (high temperature) clay deposits in the ground. The company mined the land heavily, creating several pits, which are scattered in the area. Being very close to the sea shore, they had to dump fired ceramic shards on the shore constantly, in order to build a bank preventing sea water to enter the pits. All the pits are now abandoned and filled with water, becoming cute lakes for recreation tourism which is the sole basis of income to the islanders in the present.
At our next stop, also a lake now, we found lots kaolin (the essential ingredient of porcelain). I took samples from two places, one was very plastic, the other one was very white but mixed with coarse sand. My hands and shoes caked with clay, I' was picking up all kinds of rocks and mineral samples all day long, stuffing them next to the camera and notebook in my daypack. By the time we arrived home I must have collected at least 5 kilos of stuff. Some of this went right into the kiln. In two days I can see what this clay looks like and does when baked to 1260 degrees Celsius. The last and most amazing stop on the tour was a part of the coast just south of Ronne. We had to cut through private land (with special permission only,) and climb down a steep path to access this very special and scenic shoreline area. Here in the side of the sand-cliff, there were two kinds of earthenware (very low temperature clay that is saturated with iron) side by side: one is blue-gray and the other is flaming red. And tons - and tons of it; making crackled mounds like a giant's playground. There was also slate and rounded stones of many kinds (I wish I'd know the proper names!): fossilized black wood from the sea, stones that looked like baked chunks of this red clay, and finely layered hunks of compressed sand (something like a sandstone, except this splits easily). Amazing stuff! In the 17th century a fleet of fleeing Swedish boats shipwrecked near this coast. Until present day the sea still delivers something on occasion (sometimes it is silver cups) from these long sunken boats.

All this is not just curious history or a geology lesson. This field trip for me was very much part of the research for my current project... which, I promise, I'll describe in detail in the next post.