Skip to main content

come close, very close

At first glance, I thought this picture was of something I knew very well… I read in the article that it is a 1/4" macro of a Tom Thompson oil painting, photographed by Jon Sasaki. When this tiny fragment of the painting is blown up to become a new picture of 16 x 24 inches, it seems to look like a surface I am much more familiar with - the soft, shiny, dry, smooth, rough, cracked - etc etc - deeply nuanced surface of a glazed ceramic work.


Jon Sasaki: macro photographic image of a quarter inch square of a Tom Thompson oil painting. 2013. 

Close-up photography has offered a very different perspective on the oil painting surface, revealing how different media, and our different tools - brush, knife, finger - can be so different in process, or appear so alike, simply by offering a different scale of seeing, to appreciate what is there.


Temperature and the pressure of the brush or tool affected how the oil paint originally flowed and levelled, its shape frozen as it dried out. Though carefully stored at room temperature, the paint has aged over time, it has cracked, and will continue to change, slowly; there is a physical, on-going temperature-time relationship in the material. The same is true of the firing of ceramic glazes, where vastly accelerated mineral transformations are caused by extreme temperatures in the kiln—it is literally hot enough to make crushed rocks melt! 


Flanders Fields - detail. Ceramic glaze materials on stoneware clay, raw fired to 1160C.
Christine Pedersen. 2011.

As the ceramic cools, the new chemical compounds in the glaze mixture freeze into surface, colour, and shape; some residual tension perhaps unwinding into ‘music’ from the kiln - the dreaded, but beautiful, ping and tinkle of cracking glazes (that’s something for another post). And it doesn’t always stop there - ceramic pieces may take decades to develop surface cracks in the glaze - just like oil paint.

The medium conveys a message. It seems that time, and different ways of seeing, can add to or change our understanding. In oil paint, as in ceramics, there is also the role of time’s arrow (1. see physicist Sean Carroll’s excellent short talk). Ironic that a finished work of art increases the entropy—the disorder—of the universe, even though locally we have lowered it, by creating one unique arrangement of materials. Entropy, in our large-scale, or more poetically, ‘coarse-grained’ version of the physical world takes on the finished work, slowly mutating the arrangement of materials created by the artist. And eventually will reclaim it all.

1. Physicist Sean Carroll with a concise and excellent discussion of the ‘arrow of time’ http://sixtysymbols.com/videos/arrow_of_time.htm

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

narrative jewellery: tales from the toolbox book launch

For every piece of jewellery I make there is a story. It can be simple, just a note on the “why?” that led to the forms and textures, or the feeling that I want to remember. Sometimes the single idea that could become a piece, conceived way before the act of making, can become so over-whelming that I need to write a whole new reality for the jewellery to exist within. That’s how it was for “Pull”, the first piece of jewellery in a body of work that became the ReFind Collection *. It caused me to look at materials in my home, especially the things that were routinely thrown away, very differently. It was like waking up to realize I just hadn’t been paying the right kind of attention to all the “stuff” in other areas of my life; realizing that maybe jewellery could be linked to something as obscure as industrial-scale food-processing and packaging—if I allowed my mind to receive the information, differently. I am very honoured that my necklace has been included in Mark Fenn’s new ...

#GroundsForDiscovery - a series of unlikely events, and how science and art work together beautifully

This begins about 110 million years ago with the death of an 18-foot long armour-plated ‘lizard’, some time after it had enjoyed a large salad. Six years ago the fossilized animal re-surfaced at Alberta’s Suncor Millennium Mine, as an excavator dug down to recover the bituminous remains of prehistoric plants and animals in the tar-sands layer. The Royal Tyrrell Museum and National Geographic hail the dinosaur fossil as the finest specimen of its kind in the world—it is the best preserved, with armoured plates and even some skin tone visible. It is also the oldest dinosaur ever found in Alberta. As yet un-named nodosaur fossil. Photo: Kristi Van Kalleveen. #GroundsForDiscovery See the nodosaur fossil up close in this beautifully photographed essay from National Geographic , published in the June 2017 edition. All of the Grounds For Discovery exhibit fossils were accidentally discovered during mining and excavation work in Alberta. As the Tyrrell specimen fact sheet ...

Ceramics by Christine Pedersen available at Toronto Outdoor Art Fair, exclusively online.

"Blue One". Unglazed blue porcelain vessel. Christine Pedersen. 2023. Toronto Outdoor Art Fair runs Friday July 12 - 14, 2024, and my ceramics will be available for sale exclusively online, find my profile here . I’m thrilled to have been juried into the show, and will be offering work from a few different series, with new work, and pieces from my collection that have never been shown.  Only 10 pieces can be listed online at a time, so please do email me if you see other work on my instagram or Facebook feeds that you would like to know more about.  Online sales will continue until March 2025.  Thanks for checking out my work, and I hope you'll enjoy looking around at loads of great art at the show. Background Vortex vessel. Pinched black porcelain. Christine Pedersen. 2023. Originally from the UK, I’ve been making ceramics in my home studio in Calgary, Alberta, Canada since 1999. My main form is sculptural vessels, as functional and decorative centre-pieces for the ho...