The artifacts that stole my attention from the museum were two thousand-year-old small glass
bottles called angu and taria. These are some of the earliest examples of roman blown glass.
Discovering the case in the archives, i was mesmerized
such simple vessels that endured millennia. I wondered how many lives they had lived through,
what stories they had seen. Everything made garner's experience and narrative
and these bottles felt like a message from long ago. My pieces are inspired by their forms, but
also, I wanted this collection to reflect the small narratives now lost to time and memory.
Everyday moments in life each recorded by a vessel of its own.
My collection is a group of bottles, made in porcelain to represent glass,
some lustered echoing the iridescence of the ancients from cubantaria
and each with its own personal glaze, for no two memories nor moments in time are the same.
Hi my name is Laura Matikaite. My chosen object from the museum was
an early 19th century pocket globe, in its own case. Made from wood and plaster.
The globe itself shows the continents and the inside of the case the celestial skies.
My piece consists of five spheres, each one fitting inside the other. Each sphere
incorporating visual and symbolic interpretations from the original object and I've taken the
opportunity to represent this through the use of different ceramic techniques and materials
such as the metallic oxides of iron, chrome, cobalt, copper and gold. The original pocket globe
had an educational aspect which included discovery and knowledge and in producing my spheres I
had made my own creative journey of discovery. Creating a sphere from two thrown hemispheres was
an enjoyable technical challenge and the spheres definitely got rounder as the weeks went by.
Using an existing object as a guide for building a concept has definitely proven to be inspiring
Inspiration behind my pieces were a 17th century blown glass wine bottle. These
bottles are sometimes referred to as onion bottles, because of their bulbous form and
originally that is what attracted me to them. Upon closer inspection I realized it was the surface of
the aged glass itself I found so beautiful. Now to capture that or reflect that, in my own work
took extensive testing and glaze research to come up with a group of glazes that would show the
qualities that I had originally found so beautiful in the bottle. I also chose to work in porcelain
because it shares qualities with glass, in the way that light can pass through the
material. So combining this translucency with layers of glazes on a contemporary bottle form
and which also sits beside a small drinking cup as an extension of the original function.
The piece that i've chosen from the museum's collection is a hand-carved irish wooden spoon.
I like the spoon for the simplicity of its form. It's an everyday humble functional object.
I started by examining the asymmetrical qualities in the bowl of the spoon itself and from there
designed a series of bowl forms. I wanted the bowl forms to sit just ever so slightly at an angle to
capture the asymmetrical qualities in the spoon but I also wanted them to capture the movement
in the grain of the wood. So it was important to me that the grain became part of the fabric of the
clay. So in order to achieve this I threw with two different colored porcelain clays and then
depending on how I layered those clays together I could get different wood grain patterns.
For me, this worked on two levels, it looks like wood grain but it also reveals how the clay moves
when it's thrown on the wheel. My final piece is a series of wheel thrown porcelain bowl forms
with a wood grain pattern running through them.
The piece I've chosen is a bronze Iranian begging bowl and what really attracted me to the piece
first was the interesting flattened boat-like form and especially the intricately carved
surface decoration. So my aim was to really showcase the surface pattern
and pay homage to it. So what i've done is, i've created a new form based on the angular flattened
form of the begging bowl and recreated the metallic engraved surface using clay.