Kickstarter

I am working on an installation in porcelain to present at the California Conference for the Advancement of Ceramic Arts this year. The installation will be a room with hundreds of suspended porcelain "leaves" that glow and softly hum. The leaves are crafted one at a time by pushing my hand into a small amount of porcelain clay until it is less than a millimeter thin. Peeling the clay off of my hand creates the organic, curled leaf-shape, and firing it to 2,300 degrees causes them to become translucent like a piece of rice paper. Suspended from above by silk thread and incredibly thin magnet wire, spotlights will illuminate them from above and behind, allowing the leaves to glow and the skin-print to become visible. The hand-prints will all be pointed upward, as if reaching toward the light. The porcelain is highly resonant, and attached to about 200 of them will be tiny piezo transducers that will vibrate them, allowing them to hum at their own tone. Each tone will be different depending on the size and shape of each piece. The viewer will enter the darkened room to the soft chorus of the reaching, glowing hands. 

The piece is entitled Left, the past tense of leave. It addresses ideas of the struggle of ascension, not necessarily in the religious sense, but in the sense of some rising above and some being left behind. The process of making the leaves speaks to manufacture, and the human face and voice behind the mass-produced object, liking the maker with the product. The voices together make a chorus, but this chorus not necessarily harmonious- but rather a collection of individual tones melding together in our ears. The suspended leaves hang in the formation of an arch, which can also be seen as a bell-curve and the crest of a sine wave. The piece creates a contemplative space, displaying a dynamic between the different leaves, as individuals and as a group.

While the making of the leaves involves a a large investment of time, the funds will give me a head-start on the investment in the electronic components and other materials needed to realize the installation. The end goal is to present the piece at the California Conference for the Advancement of Ceramic Arts.