Gaudi and Carbon Sequestration

In 2006 on the way back from a  trip to the US visiting family, I stopped off in Barcelona for a once in a lifetime visit. We had 3 days and a camera. I knew it was unlikely that I would ever be coming back this way again and so even though I was unwell at the time, it was  all senses switched on to gobble up as much as I could to fuel me for years of memories.
I had read obsessively about Antoni Gaudi and his extraordinary creations before we headed there but I don't think I was really prepared for the reality of his vision and ambition.

I know a lot more about ambition now...
While I was there I was greedy for as many images of his project Parc Guell as I could capture. It is impossible to describe the size of this huge mosaiced serpentine seat which surrounds the high plateau of the Park. It was January and  quite warm and I was distressed to see so many people sitting on this seat that I had only a couple of hours to photograph. How dare they escape from a dismal winter across the Mediterranean on the one day I had to visit Barcelona and Parc Guell and loll about in the sun on the very thing I wanted to photograph!

So I just had to be content with the 100 or so photos I took... yes really! I just wanted to own the thing.

 

Of course despite my best efforts you cannot grasp the size of this endeavour on a few small images. This seat overlooks the city of Barcelona and all its smog which I reckon is because everyone in Barcelona smokes. Talk about global warming! First breath of the day for millions of them is a cancer stick and you can watch the smoke rising over the morning to obliterate the view. Sad! How much could we do to abate global warming by just banning cigarettes. There is no part of the process which is good for the planet or anyone on it.

 

Well back to ambition and thoughts of saving the world from carbon. I felt guilty at having travelled so many kilometres purely for pleasure and I wanted to do as many things as I could to atone for my sins.

I was building a new garden so that seemed a good place to start and with the help of the local supermarket skip we buried hundreds of cardboard boxes under a thick mulch of gravel to try to control kikuyu grass until new plants could compete. It looked spectacular for a long while and the plants have grown well.

But that didn't seem enough and I had ideas about building a Gaudi style bench on a more modest scale. Friends nearby had built a brand new home and no matter how green you try to be there is just wrapping on everything which has to be carted away. I decided I was going to start with junk that would have ended in landfill to begin my dream.

I took all of their junk and filled up as many of the packing boxes as possible as tight as drums. These were the building blocks.

 

Next we stacked the boxes side by side and held them down with chicken wire and placed another upright wall of wire mesh behind it.

 

Then bit by bit we smothered it in concrete. On the curving parts and upright back I had no idea how to make it stick but I had plenty of hay so mixed that into the concrete and it worked wonders. You can also see the lovely gravel courtyard we made underneath with all those hidden boxes.

 

Well the main structure of the seat has been complete for several years now and the garden has grown wild around it so the next part of the job has to start.

 

The mosaic. EEh gads! It is so big!

I have made a mosaic before which now adorns a tabletop. I made it at a Deborah Halpern workshop at the National Gallery of Victoria. She did advise me that I had maybe bitten off a bit too much for the period of the workshop which was of course red rag to a bull! Here it is.

 

So now with many broken failed pieces of ceramic work and test tiles and maybe donations from other ceramic artists I can cobble together a fitting tribute to Gaudi.

If you stand on the seat this is the great view. And the insides of the seat have been providing food for wood bugs (slaters) for years which in turn have fed the local birds. That's what Carbon Sequestration is really about.

 

 

 

Caring for Our Dirt

So far this blog has been a bit of a scatter gun approach to things that I am passionate about and you may ask when is she is ever going on focus on ceramics?

Well the truth is I have a female brain, so I don’t focus on just one thing at a time. (Actually my brain is more like an electronic toy left in damp conditions and just annoyingly firing randomly and constantly :P ) My work with clay brings me into deep meditation with the actual clay and its history and biology while also focussing on its future life and impact. It is beholden on me to be responsible to create the safest, earth nurturing practices and while playing and experimenting, to not produce more junk in the universe.

Therefore my practice has to be holistic.

I have to be mindful of where my refuse goes. Refuse in this case can be anything from clay mixed with water at the end of the day to dry glaze materials made of combinations of dry minerals and metals, as well as bisque clay (fired to hard but still porous), fully fired failures, off gassing, and carbon output from firing as well as transport. Not to mention plastic bags and plastic containers which seem to grow like topsy in the studio.

My first rule is that whatever can be reclaimed is. So breakages get smashed up and buried in pots as drainage or broken up for mosaic projects (more about that another time).

Super soil  as found in South America has developed over centuries as healthy microbes have built up on the surface of discarded, broken Mayan pottery shards. The miniature crevices in the low fired clay provide just the right conditions for successful proliferation of the microbes so I use that as one my guiding criteria and feel comfortable in burying smashed up shards in deepish holes around the garden. The worms and critters seem to love it.

Water and clay slurry at the end of the day is left to evaporate and is reincorporated into new mixes of clay. None of it goes down the drain! I cannot afford the plumbing.

In my sink I have a large plastic sink bucket. Everything is washed inside this and the following morning when the levels have settled the top water is poured off into the garden via a filtering system .

This is a 1.2m deep plastic lined pit of layered broken pottery, building rubble, scoria, sheep’s wool, sand, more scoria ,more sand and topped with decorative pebble. It is purpose built, based around a building oversight when the slab was poured for our house. It was a lot of work to rectify in one day but I believe it works brilliantly.  It is also a pretty courtyard.

There is a small drainage pipe at the bottom which then leads the filtered water into the first part of my garden through irises and native grasses and tree ferns which are all renowned for different filtering capabilities. Beyond that line most of the plants that follow are edible and so I am constantly aware of not poisoning myself or the environment. The happy sound of frogs in my garden assures me that it is pretty healthy out there.

Glaze materials which can include copper, manganese, nickel ,cobalt, iron and various encapsulated colourants are all treated with due care. They also mix with clay sludge and because of their weight fall to the bottom of the sink bucket. After the lighter water is poured off, the really dull sludge is poured into a settling bucket to dry out. So far I only have half a bucket of this sludge after 18 months. If this is later mixed with clay it can be fired into paving stones or just lumps and will no longer be able to leach into the soil.

Water is collected from our roof in a 10,000litre rainwater tank and flushes our toilets, and waters all the gardens as well as feeding our air cooling system in a closed cycle. Electricity comes from a roof full of solar panels offsetting any electricity from firings. I also use a gas kiln for large sculptural pieces and it is only fired when it is full which may take months. The off gassing from the kilns is kept as safe as possible with minimal use of heavy metals, endeavouring to fire when air is moving in a northerly direction towards the enormous park opposite, for the trees to filter the air first. My bedroom lies in direct line between the kiln and the park so I am also keen to not poison myself. From what I have read about the materials released every time a cigarette is lit, my rigour is chickenfeed but it helps me sleep at night. And all those plastic bags and plastic containers can have several more years of use before they eventually get fed back into the recycling stream washed free of clay residue.

When you buy ceramics from 3^rd world countries, just remember that the waste products are much worse, the working conditions are horrific, safety practices are non existent, effects on the environment are cumulative and destructive because of lack of education and that the true cost of manufacture and shipping does not reflect in a fair price for workers and destruction of habitat. Think global buy local.

I found this trailer for a movie I am keen to watch http://www.thedirtmovie.org/. The stuff we are working with every day is going to be harder and harder to come by in the future if we don’t keep recycling our organic waste and nurturing our soil. It’s just dirt but we can’t live without it.