Details

These are some detail photos (taken with a cell phone, so necessarily blurry), of a piece I made years ago. It's called the hand, the eye, the word, and it doesn't exist anymore. On Saturday, after I took these photos, I had Dave fling it against a cinder block wall. (If you want to see the whole piece, intact, there's a photo at my non-craftsy blog, Rosa.)

This is the back of the piece:

The piece was built on this example of my very early carved work, a skeleton holding a trio of flowers. I made this piece first and it sat and sat and sat, waiting for me to be inspired enough to glaze it. I never did. Instead, it was pressed into service as the base that I built the rest of this piece on.

Here are a couple of things you might notice about the back:

One is that the piece was hung by discarded keys (glued to the piece with a two-part epoxy) and wire. I used two sets of keys because the piece was so heavy that I didn't want to risk one set. The other thing is that the whole piece was held together with glaze. Those heavy swaths of white glaze were actually acting as kind of glue to hold all the bits together.

This is my hand, a cast of my hand anyway. It was also held on with glaze. I used my hand at one end and the hand of a then-friend (someone who is definitely no longer in my life, hasn't been for a long time, and never will be again) at the other end.

This is that friend's hand.

I hated this as soon as I applied the gold patina to it. It reminded me too much of Lt. Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I do/did like the glaze effect on the background. It was a mixture of several different glazes, a glossy white, a runny gun-metal green, a crackle glaze, and a Chun red. It was meant to look like a turbulent, angry sky.

This is the eye part of the work. All those eyes belong to another friend who I am no longer in contact with. Again, I hated the gold patina on it.

You can also see examples of the words there, pages ripped from a trashed copy of a Dostoyevsky novel.

Here are a couple of close ups of those words:

I'm glad this piece is out of my life, actually.