Resurgam

The novel-writing experience I embarked upon so naively was both exciting and very inspiring, but took over and sometimes became a bit of a daily ordeal rather than pure creative pleasure. At the risk of spouting yet another cliché, it was quite a cathartic process, but nonetheless, relentlessly exhausting.

The ”Quantity more important than Quality” rule is rather frustrating to say the least and there’s no time for editing - we’re not really actually allowed to edit as such! So I regurgitated a lot of very poor quality, dreary drivel indeed, under constant pressure to hit the 50,000 word count in 30 days. Apparently a perfectly normal sensation for NaNoWriMo writers.

So. This book-with-no-plot, characters, synopsis or plan of any kind, turned out to be a massive jumble of fumbling styles, from Kafka to Mills and Boon, William Burroughs to Norton Juster.

It was basically a long, very disorganised list of words.

It leapt about, got sidetracked, lost in the woods, drunk at parties, missed opportunities, got corny, messy, contrived. A derivative little story, padded out uncomfortably in an itchy drag costume, pushed out onto the stage, embarrassed and shy. It hid one day, came out to play the next. The road it travelled on felt like a ribbon, being wound backwards through a misty, dark tunnel, rather than rolling out gently in front, through beautiful countryside.

It all came to a slithery, muddy halt after 16 days, when I finally had to mutter a desolate "cheerio" after hitting what felt like a rather paltry 21,187 word count.

I watched the little evacuee on the cold, grey, station platform, name-tag tied to the lapel of his coat with string, ticket in hand, holding a tiny suitcase, looking back at me, through the steam, before boarding the train...

Surfacing from the dark NaNoWriMo isolation chamber now, a tad tired and emotional. Again, no regrets at all and a huge thank you to Louise for putting me up to this preposterous challenge, this inhumane experiment. 
 

Onwards and upwards...putting pen down...picking up pencil again....

(Thank you for waiting so patiently)

Sweetheart

"Sweetheart" by The Wave Pictures. A wonderful video by Ben Reed.
http://vimeo.com/12612924
 

Lost for Words

A deep, dark fear has started to push up out of the moist, autumn-purple soil. The settled, shady, once peaceful, textured compost is disturbed, crumbly.

A shaft of rusty iron, a spear of pure fear, has pierced the earth's surface and emerged into the ripping-rain and wringing wind...it's fast approaching...

NOVEMBER 2010:
my first
NaNoWriMo

Check it out:

http://www.nanowrimo.org/

Last Straw

Will be leaving you alone for a little while now.


My desk was flooded from the shower in our bathroom above the office, through the ceiling, - to cut a dreary, long story short.

Lots of saturated sketchbooks, exhibition submission paperwork, bank statements, Mac, contacts, plans and ideas notebooks, etc to peel apart. Exhausting. Last straw after a rather fraught month or two.

Might just give up all art and sit in a rocking chair, knitting, Radio 4, blanket over me knees...(..maybeee...)

maddy@markshall.demon.co.uk

Please email with comments/feedback on any bits of this Blog. Thank you.

(And please feed the fish)

I'm not turning my back on you. Back soon xx

Snap, Crackle and Pop

...titanium dioxide...zinc oxide...cobalt oxide...red iron oxide...copper carbonate...

A more direct hands-on approach, with a different ceramics production process: Raku. The term Raku - literally, "enjoyment" or "ease" - derives from Jurakudai, the name of a palace in Kyoto in the 1500's.

A few years ago I attended an incredibly energetic workshop run by potter John Chipperfield in Suffolk. I got back into playing with mud again! We all made various pieces, either on the wheel, or hand-built, which he then biscuit-fired. We returned a few weekends later for the glazing and Big Outdoor Firing, in a kiln in his garden, brought to a roaring temperature of about 1,800 degrees F.

...some unglazed, sooty black areas around the base...

After a set time, and when the pieces are glowing red hot, they were drawn from the kiln with long iron tongs and plunged, smoking, into a trough full sawdust. This cooled the work down very quickly, causing the typical Raku look - fine, black, spidery-web crackle, a very desirable effect. This powerful process also uses the immediacy of the fire, smoke and dramatically fast reduction, to create an unpredictable texture on the pottery.

The unglazed areas have nowhere to get the oxygen from, so they take it from clay. Such a reducing atmosphere will turn clay grey-black, staining the exposed body surface with carbon, producing the powerful matt-black, smoked surface.

...and on the patterned areas inside....

The tense excitement as the final results emerge when the pots have cooled and been cleaned, proved irresistible, especially for the potters with pyromaniac tendencies.

You can see a combination of these
techniques, glazed and unglazed areas, on this bowl, where I cut various shapes from wide masking tape and arranged them on the bisque fired piece before spraying with white, speckled blue/grey - and coppery glazes.

....and some Copper Fuming visible on the inside too...

This Copper Fuming is achieved by using a mix of a 90% copper oxide and 10% glaze mixture, which gives an iridescent lustre - (sometimes) - creating a beautifully vibrant sheen. This bright, shining, metallic glaze is notoriously difficult to control and can apparently fade over time.