Seven years

I made my first ceramic sculpture in India, seven years ago. I was at an artist residency in the middle of the jungle of Baroda, working with a group of artist friends. There were cobras who shed their skin in front of our houses before dawn, monkeys who stole our bras, and peacocks who sang their lonely songs from the dark foliage at night.

I remember the studio buildings as stunningly beautiful, giant palaces of red bricks, and I was working in the printmaking studio, which was on top of a hill overlooking the jungle and which you could reach by climbing up a long and steep stairway that seemed endless under the white sun of the tropics.
On the foot of that hill was the ceramics studio, where Deveshi Sahgal, an artist whom I met there and who has become a great friend since, was working on huge sculpture, alone.

I don’t remember much about what clay I used or which glaze or what tools. I have no idea what I did, and that's probably because I had no idea what I did.
I remember Iria Do Castelo, another artist who came down with us to the ceramics studio, creating a precious head at an incredible pace, and told me that later she would cut it off and empty it, both of which amazed me, her working pace and the cutting off.
I, working much much slower, was amazed how my artwork, which was all line and flatness, translated into the third dimension. I have never been able to draw hands, but I learned that I could sculpt them. Also, I was surprised by the realism the third dimension brought to my artwork.

For whatever reason, one of the sculptures I made was a pregnant woman, and someone bought it at our exhibition we later held in New Delhi. Someone with a pregnant friend, I think. The one you see my working on the photo is called “horny woman”, she took me ages to make, and I still have her.
During the following years, traveling around the world, I worked in many printmaking studios, but I did not get in touch which clay again. It just was nowhere to be seen. But it stayed in my head. Not at the forefront, but somewhere in a dark spot in the back of my head.

The seed was sown, and it took seven years to grow.

During these years, I was a person with wings, I flew around a lot, carrying nothing but a sketchbook, and occasionally, some aluminum plates. Light stuff. I ask myself why I only started ceramics last year, and I imagine that maybe, working with ceramics requires some kind of roots. It is heavy, earthy, inert, it needs a lot of space. It needs roots, something which took me a long time to grow.

And so it happened that I started to work in ceramics after I spent a lot of time in my home country in the Austrian Alps. While the pandemic has stirred up the world, it brought a lot of calm to my life. Things have slowed down. I don’t travel as much. If I’ve been a hunter, now I’m more like a fisher. The pond does not move, but it becomes wider and deeper. One year ago, I started to work with clay, this summer I started to work with porcelain.

Ceramics, surprisingly, has a lot in common with printmaking. The suspense, the element of chance, the sense of serendipity. It can be immensely frustrating and it is incredibly satisfying. It can be the best, and it can be the worst (it is a lot like life itself). Another thing printmaking and ceramics have in common is that in these fields, you never stop learning. It is like a cosmos, a cosmos that is vital, fertile, and infinite, you can never fully explore it, and this is the beauty of it. You can walk around it forever and still encounter things that make you wonder, and make your hands feel brand new. I have just begun to walk around in it, and it makes me think of a poem I once wrote on a later stay in India:

Half of the world

When I die
I want to be able to say:
I explored half of this beautiful world
and left the other half
to my beautiful imagination

Photo: A&Y

If you want to see more of this creative India episode, here you can find SAVARI, my sketchbook from that journey

The other caravan

When my grandfather died, he left me an old travel guide called "The Soviet Orient", a thick book full of black and white photos of the most wonderful buildings – mosques, shrines, and minarets of a kind that I had never seen before. I was fascinated by them – and I knew that I had to go to this marvelous place that did not only seem far away in space, but also in time. And then, a few years later I traveled to see the architectural beauty of the former "Soviet Orient". I traveled to Uzbekistan.

I traveled through this hypnotic country for many weeks, moving slowly and at times like in a dream under the hot, heavy September sun, spending endless hours drawing and writing in the cool shade of stunningly beautiful mosques, shrines, and caravanserais, climbing up minarets, and sitting with the market women of the great bazaars, them selling vegetables and fabric, me drawing next to them.  

Seven days I spent in the legendary city of Samarkand, the most important city on the silk road, and a place where East and West met for thousands of years, where caravans pass through from all cardinal directions. I've always been intrigued by the idea of caravans, of travelers carrying treasures and stories, goods tangible and intangible, from the East to the West, and from the West to the East, the infinite deserts, great empty spaces they move through, and the caravanserais, where people from all over the world would meet, taking breaks along their long and tiresome journeys. 

The animals of the caravans were camels and horses, carrying goods like spices, silk, gold, and tea. Alongside them, I like to imagine another caravan, a caravan of fantastic animals traveling from the East to the West, paralleling the caravan of camels and horses in the hot sand like a mirage. The other caravan does not carry silk or gold, but stories, the material of dreams interweaved in flying carpets, memories of places that only exist in someone’s fantasy, tales of undiscovered stars and unknown flowers, and prayers of far deities, all things that we can’t touch, but which touch us, at a place in our heart we didn’t know existed, until it begins to stir in answer to this call in a foreign language we all of a sudden understand.

The other caravan never arrives: It’s moving in circles, like a planet, like the seasons, like a holy or an unholy book, that is read and re-read over and over, like water, which rains down on the earth and ascends again to the clouds, but also seeps away under ground just to blossom out again in bright oases.

The other caravan is richly loaded: It brings us all the fantasy that an unknown land can be for another. 

________________________

This animal is is my first one of this fantastic caravan. Maybe, hopefully, more will follow, and then I’d love them to travel all over the world, in all directions.