It was my last bit of Feeney’s DSW. It seemed the last bit in the world. Someone said the pit had closed. I felt compelled to honour the final remnant of the stuff that had become my comfort clay with a piece more glorious than anything I’d tried before. At the same time, I felt the thrill of entering a new era. After this, perhaps I could abandon factory clays altogether. Staring into the circle of dark stoneware forming in my hands, considering nothing but the perfect circle, I lost myself inside a seemingly enormous bowl. A leech, picked up half-heartedly hunting for wild clay along the bank of Bottle Creek earlier that day, dropped from my thigh and lurched in the direction of the creek. A bowl hooks desire through functionality. To disrupt this desire the decoration must move us past the functional to the point of artefact – a charmed vessel. The vase from which the motif adorning the bowl is derived was acquired at a North Fitzroy garage sale in 2016. It is my favourite vase – but why this attachment? What is there in its decorative style that sucks at me? I took one sixth of the vase pattern and repeated it 16 times around the bowl. A vase can be anything that can hold a flower but a bowl has to serve as a bowl. Staring into the circle, approaching the perfect form in my hands, is an alternate obsession to that of the intricate repetition in decoration. Possessed by the decorative fragment, I intensely explore sentimentality. Repeating a sensation of love, slicing it up, and repeating a piece of it again, over and over, drags agents from the past and gives them new life. The North Fitzroy Garage Sale Vase Detail Bowl is a committed investigation of micro-histories of desire (the charms) in decoration. It’s to do with holding ages and epochs, but not preciously – loose in a bowl. A haul of oranges rolling over one another.
