I am now officially obsessed with the beads.
I have been working on these beads since shortly after graduation, so since June, which has been about 8 months. This image is of the beads in a tray (flat file drawer)38" x 50" by 5" high. They are going to be an installation - strings of beads hanging in a wavy line from the ceiling, pooling on the floor.
Like snowflakes, each bead is different. I have used 6 different kinds of colored clay and at least 100 texturizing objects: clay tools, furniture, soles of shoes, found and scrounged objects, and fire them at differing degrees and times to bring out the varying colors in each clay. I.e sandstone buff changes from a light yellow to orange, to tan depending on the temperature. The goal of this project is to demonstrate that clay itself is beautiful and needs no glaze as enhancement and, as always, to minimize my carbon footprint by not using glazes and keeping the firing time and temp as low as possible.
My only problem (other than making them obsessively)is engineering the hanging. I want the strings mounted shower curtain style so each string can slide along the rod with differing distances between, rather than anchored in one place. And I want the hanging apparatus to be as unobtrusive as possible.
Part of the process in creating this project is my inner dialogue with handling my OCD - questioning why I have let the obsession take over until my hands are raw and I am using Polysporin as hand cream and am I just making more beads because I haven't figured out how to hang them so they look more professional than DIY and rather than an obsession maybe it's procrastination. Probably both.
Urban Ore here I come.
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