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One Hundred
Moons of Solitude
One Hundred Moons of Solitude It's been just over eight years since
I discovered the Joadja bai tunze native porcelain stone deposit near
Mittagong and started making my special bai tunze and washed gravel bowls.
I work alone, I tend to work directly from my emotions and intuitions,
so if I have any objective, it is this; that I work independently using
only what I can fashion myself from my own local resources. My work always
addresses beauty and the contemplation of beauty and my interaction with
the natural word. My failure to adequately achieve this is what drives
my search. My main concern at the current time is to envisage some sort
of relationship or engagement between intellect and passion, thought and
action, trying to bring some harmony into my own troubled existence through
the creation of beautiful objects while dealing with the tensions and
anxieties of a modern life. A life that I am attempting to live ethically
and responsibly. It is easy and glib to rattle off such statements, but
very difficult to walk the walk, to actually live it. My hundred moons
of solitude have allowed me to indulge my introspection and I have come
to realise that Garcia-Marquez was talking to me when he discovered that
place, the gap between reality and fantasy, the realm where inspiration
lies. Reality is all tough, hard work, fantasy is much more plastic and
malleable. I feel that I ought to write something profound about this,
but fail to. I would have liked to have written something meaningful perhaps
about Henryk Gorecki and Arvo Part's spiritual minimalism and radical
simplification and how it's influenced my radical localism and minimal
spirituality, but apparently not. I wish that I could have written about
my desire for beauty and simplicity, my trips to Japan, where I failed
to find my muse and how simplicity is so complex that it is indescribable
and how trying to make something elegant, simple and uncomplicated, simply
isn't simple or uncomplicated. I'd like to have said that the many long
hours spent doing mindless manual work like the sorting of little white
granules of quartz from the dross of dark rubble found on an ants nest,
so as to get just the 'right' textured grit to add to my clay body, is
actually exhilarating in the achievement of it, and that the most boring
job of grinding stones down to dust so as to make a glaze can be very
rewarding. I wanted to express something of the beauty and the rewards
in the many little steps in the creative process, no-matter what they
are and that I'm actually starting to realize that I'm often happiest
labouring at this tedious nonsense, not just because it is leading to
something bigger, (which it is) but because each step, each event, is
complete in itself, as an act of beauty. They coalesce to create the beautiful,
elegant whole that are these works. But I didn't. Probably all the better.
I failed to find my muse, I continue to fail to make it, I fail to write
about it meaningfully and I fail to adequately describe my failure. Isn't
life a beautiful and complex thing!
Steve
Harrison 2011
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