Ceramic Skull

Right from the beginning of this project I knew that I wanted to make a Skull out of ceramics. I wanted to make something real and holdable like the skulls I'd seen in Pitt Rivers, something kinda believable. This is what I like about making things in 3D, they're physical, real and right in front of you.
So I went to Valerie, the ceramics teacher, and asked her if I could make a skull and how I should go about it. She told me I needed to start with a big lump of clay then slowly carve and mould it down into shape. I worked from a skeleton reference book she had. After a whole day of working I produced this:

Yeah, it doesn't really look like a realistic skull at all..
The proportions are really quite off: The eyesockets are gaping, the nose low down and the whole form is rather flat. This is what happens when you work from a reference image with just two perspectives and work from your imagination a bit too much. Turning a 2D image into a 3D form is pretty hard as I discovered.
In fact, it was that day that I discovered that ceramics is damn hard!
So I squashed it up and gave it another go the week after.
This time, I changed a few things; I borrowed a model skull from college and decided to try and replicate it as closely as possible. This is what I managed after another full day in the ceramics room:

   

I think that I did far better this time! Having a real 3D form to work from clearly helped a lot. At no one point can the clay be thicker than 2cm if you want to fire it so I opted to scoop out the inside then make a lid/the top of the skull but while I was making it I decided against this because I realised the skull would make a great bowl to 'offer' things in. Yes! I could present the hell money that I made in it like an offering in an altar.  I was very happy that I had this idea because it gave me a way unite the ceramic skull and hell money projects which I felt were kinda lacking when presented on their own.

I have an image in my head of setting up a little altar with this skull, the money, candles, flowers and the book I am making for this project. I'd like to make that!.

But before that, I needed to glaze my skull. I looked at various examples around the classroom and decided that a plain glossy white would look nice on the outside of the skull and wanted a golden effect on the inside of the bowl. This is for purely decorative reasons but think that it will look quite bold. Anyway, Plenty of the skulls I saw in the museum had been purely for decorative reasons rather than for specific meaning. For example, this skull of a tribe leader, decorated with macrame'd carved stones:

I glazed the skull last week and it looked like this before going in the Kiln:

The Golden/bronze glaze looks like a matte gray when unfired. It also contains Lead, which is poisonous so I had to wear gloves and be very careful where I got it. It should be done tomorrow and I am very very excited to see this skull. It's been four weeks in the making!

 I am really pleased with how it turned out and I definitely think it passed the 'classmate test'- lots of people wanted to hold it, examine it and play with it which I always think is a great sign. Who wants to make art that people don't want to look at and play with?

I think that the skull presents the money well and love the uneven golden mirroring on the inside. If I was going to make this again, I would consider glazing the inside of the nose and eyes golden as well. I would also make sure the teeth were securely attached because most of the ones on my skull came off when it was drying on the shelf.
Overall, though, I managed to make a skull that I think has a very realistic form and I learnt the most I ever have about ceramics and glazing from making this.
In my final piece, I'd like to present this skull along with candles, flowers and my book, like an altar. I think that the lit candles will reflect amazingly off the skull.
I will go more indepth about my final piece in a later blogpost.

Skulls!

Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette- Vincent Van Gogh (1886)

Everybody loves skulls, right? I think they do. Artists love skulls for sure, they are a powerful motif and symbol representing many things including death, decay and the inevitable. Skeletons show what lies beneath every singe one of us.
It was the skulls and skeletons that were on display in the Pitt rivers that particularly interested me and sparked my project on the afterlife.

I wonder what he did to deserve this..
Below: Photographs from Pitt Rivers

Left: Ink drawing from a photograph I took at Pitt Rivers.
Right: observational scratch drawing of a rabbit skull.

                   

Various skulls and skeletons I found inspiring.

Initial drawings and mind map.

I was interested how the skulls of heroes were decorated but the skulls of enemies were bound up or put into torturous positions. The tribes who made these clearly believe that the condition of the skull has an impact on the person who it used to be.

It was then that I realised that a lot of cultures have death rituals and wondered what they are all about or mean.
And that is what started my research. I looked at contemporary illustrators' images of skulls using tumblr and pinterest to see different styles and interpretations. I also paid attention to other motifs used in conjuction with skeletons.

Dead King- Vance Kelly

Skull girl 1- Gaksdesigns

The Grateful dead's logo.

Artwork for the Grateful Dead, whose logo is a 
skull and lightning bolt. Roses and other 
flowers are seen with skulls in art a lot.

Dia de los Muertos, or the 'day of the dead' is a very famous south american festival of the dead. Families gather to remember lost loved ones, share gifts and build private altars to pray to the dead.
I like when flowers are used in conjucnction with skulls because it makes me think of new life. Our bodies rot down into nutrients which is food for worms, maggots and plants. Once we die, our body becomes a small part of many organisms and effectively lives on.
Our bodies are made up of chemicals and energy that have made up millions of other life forms. Ain't that crazy?

''Per Peccatum Mors..  In Omnes Homines Mors Pertransiit'
'death through sin..   death spread amongst all men'
-Alexander Mair 1605

The hell money that I made features two grinning skeletons.
I hope you can see how the image above partially inspired this.

I made this drawing over a marbled piece of paper in the second week and a teacher mentioned that it reminded them of a Damien Hirst installation that features brightly spin-painted skulls. 

Aztec skull in the British museum.

I found This video about Hirst's thought process behind this piece which is very interesting and I feel we share quite a few thoughts on death, especially that it is incomprehensible and thus very hard to picture in your head or communicate. Hirst especially addresses this with his most famous piece; 'The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living'. I think that the name explains itself really quite well already. 

It is a Huge shark preserved in formaldehyde. When seen it can trigger quite an immediate fear response before the viewer realises that is is dead. The shark looks so alive, so animated within the tank. Hirst has managed to capture a feeling of life and death within one thing. I'm not surprised this is as famous as it is.

I also made a ceramic skull but that will be covered by a whole other blog post!

Research

The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, John Martin, 1852. 

When I start a project I like to create a pinboard on pinterest and gather together research constantly and actively. Sometimes I like to sit in bed and find research images.


When I first made my afterlife pinboard for this project the very first thing I added was 'The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah' By John Martin. I have seen this painting in person and it brought out very strong feelings in me. To start with, the painting is over a metre and a half wide meaning that the scale sucks you in and takes up your vision. The blurry swooshing fire casts down from the engulfing violet clouds. And from these clouds strikes a bold glowing lightening bolt. This is an image of gods fury and vengeance. An image of a fire and brimstone old testament god. An image of hell on earth .
This is what happens to sinners, folks!

I want to add something to this image. I'm just not sure what to add yet.

Last week when I was paper Marbling, I decided to try and emulate the colour and feeling of inferno in John Martin's painting:

I looked at other traditional Christian paintings such as 'An Angel Frees the Souls of Purgatory' by Lodovico Carracci (1610):

This depicts heaven, hell and the in-between. 

Angels feature in art of the afterlife quite a lot. I especially like Gustav Dore's etchings of angels for Dante's Divine Comedy. I was shown these by one of our teachers, Chris.

'The hosts of heaven' (1868) 

Lucifer falling from heaven. 

As I said above, these images are inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy, an epic poem by Dante Alighieri, begun c. 1308 and completed 1320.
I will talk about this more in another blog post.

Other religious art I have looked at includes depictions of Ragnarok- the old norse doomsday where the gods and half of the dead warriors, lead by Odin, face off against the forces of evil. It is foretold that Surtr will engulf the earth in flame leaving no life except for one man and one woman.

'Battle of the Doomed Gods' -Friedrich Wilhelm Heine (1882) 

The couple left to repopulate the world is Líf- the feminine name for life and Lífþrasir- masculine, translating to 'lover of life'. I love how this ties together Christian ideas of doomsday and Adam and Eve; the Stories of the end and the beginning of the world. This alludes to a cycle that goes on forever.

The last bit of research that I'm going to stick on this blogpost is Buddhist. Mandalas are very popular in Buddhism, monks will spend days pouring out coloured sand into huge intricate patterns that represent concepts such as night, day, life, death as well as the three realms of afterlife they believe in.

'Thangka' aka the wheel of life.
The central 3 animals represent Greed (pig), Hatred (snake) and Lust (cock).I think that Buddhists are very cool and appreciate their use of bright colour and radial-based art. I once read all about their ideas of extra planes that one could ascend to after life but it is too much to write down here right now. I might look it up again and see if it could inspire my work.


I lied, I'm going to throw one more image in that I've been researching; Baphomet, the Sabbatic goat;

By Yuri Leitch. Original icon by Eliphas Levi.

Baphomet represents man, woman, good, evil, life and death. Baphomet represents the sum total of everything. It was an idol supposedly worshipped by the Knights Templar but since then it has been used by occultists such as Szandor LaVey, the infamous author of the satanic bible.



Once again, I don't really have enough time to go into the details of these books (it's 1am and I have college tomorrow!) but you can read about them here and here. The satanic bible is 'composed of four books: The Book of Satan, The Book of Lucifer, The Book of Belial, and The Book of Leviathan. The Book of Satan challenges the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule, and promotes hedonism. The Book of Lucifer holds most of the philosophy in The Satanic Bible, with twelve chapters discussing topics such as indulgence, love, hate, and sex. LaVey also uses the book to dispel rumours surrounding the religion. In The Book of Belial, LaVey details rituals and magic. He discusses the required mindset and focus for performing a ritual, and provides instructions for three rituals: those for sex, compassion, or destruction. The Book of Leviathan provides four invocations for Satan, lust, compassion, and destruction.' -Wikipedia page for The Satanic Bible

Well that's it for now! I'm not sure which bits of this research I'm going to develop yet so I decided to put it all up here to start with and to get my thoughts going.
Right, I'm off to bed.

Week 3- Hell money

In last week's blogpost, I discussed my idea to produce money for the afterlife. This idea was inspired by various things; primarily, this hell money that my mum gave to me a while ago:

This has been stuck on my wall for a few years, I don't know its origin.

I was also inspired by ancient Roman ideas of giving Charon- the ferryman of the dead, an 'Obolus' coin. This was not to pay for the passage, but to say thank you to the gods for their life.

These were my first concept designs, inspired by the hell money I had already and a tenner I had on my desk. I used crosshatching and other pen shading techniques to emulate the style of printed money. I also included floral motifs, the ouroboros symbol and skeletons. 'Exanimus Expensum' means 'Death cost' in Latin and the asian characters are taken from the original hell money.
From these experiments, I produced a final Heads and tails design:

I really like what I made and feel that I pulled my favourite parts from the first designs well.
The next step was to print this out a few times but with the front and back printed on opposite sides.

Initially, I wanted to print them on special paper that felt like money but college had no paper like that unfortunately. So I decided to add a green paper texture to the notes in Photoshop and then printed them on paper in the reprographics department. The ink left the paper feeling glossy and un-money-like so I didn't want that. In the end I decided to print the money in black and white. I sliced them up into 24 individual notes then washed them with diluted watercolour on both sides. This left the notes soggy and malleable allowing me to screw them up, tear them and generally weather them.

I'm very chuffed with how these came out! They look quite authentic to me. My classmates enjoyed throwing them about. I think it's a good sign when your classmates are interested in what you've made. I'm not sure how to present the money, I might stack them together. I'm also considering making a film or taking a series of images of myself burning the money.