Clay

Artist's Statement - World Turtle:

The idea for this piece came from the book by John Green Turtles All The Way Down. I was inspired by the idea of the World Turtle, and that we are all living on a turtle's shell, and the curvature of the earth is only the curve of the turtle's shell. I wanted to maintain that the Turtle was the universe, so I not only incorporated the earth, but also the sun and the moon. I wanted to play with the radiating lines that a lot of turtles have on their shells, so I made my marks along those lines. I wanted to incorporate how the skin of sea turtles sparkles like stars, so I added stars to the body.
I chose to do sgraffito instead of painting because I thought that it would be an interesting juxtaposition to have humans carve their way into the universe. additionally, I wanted to create a balance of black and white, so I thought that sgraffito would do well with that. Overall, I chose to work with clay for this because clay feels like a very natural resource. Clay is something that people have been using for generations, so it felt right to create the universe out of this material. I chose black underglaze too because I wanted to play with the idea of space as black and the stars as white, and maybe turn some of that on its head, and mess around with the universe.
I have some trouble with the construction at first, because the clay would not support itself. I figured out that you could prop it up with paper towels, and that would help it support itself. I also had some trouble with the sgraffito process as the clay began to be more and more dry. I found that I was losing some of the detail I wanted. One this I tried to do to combat this was try to make it look uniform. I went back to places where I did have some of that detail, and went over it again to make it uniform to the places that didn't have detail. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices in art, and I learned that this can sometimes make a peice better.