I’ve been in Manchester this week doing some master classes for the City Art Gallery. Today though , I’ve been back working on my thesis again... I made a reference in writing I did some time ago to my English Landscape series of works. Some of these were based on a decal created from an engraving of a view of the River Thames (scanned at Orleans House Gallery in  1998). I’ve been trying to locate other earlier versions of works made from the print to tie up some loose ends in the reference. ‘Little’ investigations like these completing a reference or footnote actually take up an inordinate amount of time. You think you’ve finished a paragraph or chapter and then find lots of small details missing key links. I experienced similar time stretching tasks when writing Painted Clay and Ceramics and Print  but usually in connection with captions and details for images in the text. Writing time seems to extend indefinitely and you wonder if the end is ever in sight... some days it seems to roll along at a gallop, others grind slowly imperceptibly forward... and at other times you write all day and end up no further on in content or textual volume. I get no better at accurately estimating completion times or days for paragraphs or chapters.

Edward Gorey’s first book The Unstrung Harp, or Mr Earbrass Writes a Novel summarizes the feelings and frustrations encountered when writing - its a deliciously absurd a little tome.... here’s a couple of small bits....

Mr Earbrass has rashly been skimming through the early chapters, which he has not looked at for months, and now sees TUH for what it is. Dreadful, dreadful, DREADFUL. He must be mad to go on enduring the unexquisite agony of writing when it all turns out drivel. Why didn’t he become a spy? How does one become one? Why is there no fire? Why aren’t there the makings of one? How did he get in the unused room on the third floor?

Even more harrowing than the first chapters of a novel are the last, for Mr Earbrass anyway. The characters have one and all become throughly tiresome, as though he had been trapped at the same party with them since the day before; neglected sections of the plot loom on every hand, waiting to be disposed of; his verbs seem to have withered away and his adjectives to be proliferating beyond control. Furthermore at this stage he inevitably gets insomnia. Even reading ‘The Truffle Plantation’ (his first novel) does not induce sleep. In the blue horror of dawn the vines in the carpet appear likely to begin twining up his ankles....

Anyway.. back to the artworks.... The platter English Countryside No:7 240307 (above) was created in the Art Department, Denison University, Granville Ohio in March 2007 on a Home TM porcelain platter bought from a large department store just outside the town. This particular collage incorporated small images of cows originally made as free-standing elements of countryside vignettes or assemblages... It also extended the original print horizontally. This piece was shown in my Phd exhibition.

The collage on the square dish was made in Kecskemét, Hungary in 1998. My record keeping of objects made and sold was OK ten years ago, but probably not the most efficient system - relying as it did on annotated photographs, stored in wooden card drawers (see below). The system was OK as long as items stored were returned to their proper place after use... Unfortunately some photos are missing or misfiled in my old archive, and they had never been digitized. Searching for the square dish I remembered the Ceramics Collection, Aberystwyth archive where there is Moira Vincetelli’s record of the HOP2 event where the artwork was created, and hey ho there was a small pic too. It was good to go back to the report and remember the HOP2 event... the Aberystwyth site is also a good resource if you’re interested in ceramic collections, and studio pottery. The Arts Centre hosts the biennial International Ceramics Festival.

The process also took me back to Les Lawrence’s web site The International Museum of Print and Clay made quite a few years ago. Les has retired so the site has not been updated for many years, there are loads of dead links... Still has lots of interesting stuff on it though.