Final Post

Middle Finger Statement:

Society, in many regards, is crumbling all around us.  There’s constant strife in the Middle East, political dissidence all across the globe and questionable economic fortitude.  The human has two innate responses to conflict, flight or fight.  Many chose the flight either literally by fleeing a region or ignoring the political atrocities taking place.  The ones that make the news, the ones we hear most about though are those that stand up and fight.  In many cases this is viewed as a moral and just cause, to fight back against the man; however, this is often an impossibility.  You simply cannot fight fire with fire and as evident in Egypt, overturning a violent dictator with violence doesn’t lead to peace regardless of the intention of the movement.  It doesn’t matter how much you tell someone “fuck you!” all you will do is insight more violence, it has no actual power.

Shrooms:

Our society today is vastly disconnected with nature.  People, myself included, walk around constantly looking at our smartphones or listening to music that only we can hear.  This has led to a slow downward spiral in our society.  There was a time when humans would walk around and live in concert with nature and each other and in some corners of the world this is still the culture.  While many are unhappy in modern society it is difficult to find unhappiness and depression amongst those with a close connection to nature. 

Mushrooms are everywhere.  They are the rejuvenating life blood of many ecosystems.  Mushrooms play a large role in the life cycle of forests as they are great decomposers, converting dead trees and foliage into usable nutrients for other trees and organisms.  For this piece I wanted to highlight the contrast between how a majority of the society lives and how we could live.  I saw the mushroom as a perfect vessel for this because while our society does have major shortcomings all is not lost and with the help of the ‘mushrooms’ we can return to a more holistic lifestyle and reach an unmatched state of happiness.  I chose to include the middle finger on the top to highlight the connection between nature and humans and show how if done correctly we can come out of nature and use nature to further our happiness and wellbeing.

Confluence:

The two artists I chose to base my contempary confluence project on are Ettore Sottsass and Hunchung Lee.  Ettore Sottsass has an extremely clean style with bright colors.  A great deal of his work is totems comprised of various brightly colored shapes.  I chose to blend this with Hunchung Lee’s raw almost dirty style.  I wanted to bring together two extremes with a ‘neutral’ subject so I chose, based on other artists I found during the research, to go with a functional wear motif.  I chose to use tea cups and tea pots as the form to experiment with combining clean and dirty styles.

For the final presentation I have one of the totems of a bowl with three cups on top of the mushroom cap attached with a curved stick.  While this isn’t what I intended when starting the project I like the way they work together and bring up themes of interconnections.

Munko:

 My favorite artists, the person who really got me interested in art, is David Choe.  He is a painter from California who started as a graffiti artists, one of his most common tags is a whale he calls munko.  He has carried this whale throughout his entire artistic career and it is a defining characteristic of him. I chose to use this form and play with texture on the surface of the forms.  In building the forms I began to think about the differences in humans and how we are all mostly the same, two eyes and ears, a nose, mouth, the same basic bones, etc. at the same time each and every person is completely different from the next.  This is because of subtle differences like skin completion or minute differences in bone structure that result in variations on the surface, this is how we distinguish between individuals.  These differences are extremely important, they are the only thing we have that makes this life truly interesting.  I chose to keep the pieces relatively similar with small differences so that those differences stand out and can be appreciated.

Confluence Project blogs 8 and 10

HunChung Lee

BORN
1967  Seoul, Korea

EDUCATION
PH.D Architecture Kyung-won University, Kyungki-do, Korea, 2007-
M.F.A. Sculpture, Graduate School at San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, U.S.A, 1994-'96
M.F.A. Ceramic Sculpture, Graduate School at Hong-ik University, Seoul, Korea, 1991-'94
B.F.A. Ceramic Sculpture, Hong-ik University, Seoul, Korea, 1986-'91

Mukuhara Kashun

Born in Hagi-1949j

He is known for his expertise in using age-old traditional techniques to produce beautiful contemporary pieces, infused with a sense of warmth and spirituality.

Joanne Greenbaum







Ettore Sottsass
born on 14 September 1917 in Austria-Hungary
died 31 December 2007 in Milan, Italy









Ettore Sottsass and Hunchung Lee:
I began thinking I was going to do a confluence of Hunchung Lee and Mukuhara Kashun.  I really like the refined raw finish they both bring to their work.  It evokes primal emotions and, I think, allows for the underlying meaning to come through.  I also like the content of both artists, the mostly functional ware of Kashun and the figures of Lee.  While doing more research I came across Ettore Sottsass whose work is such a contrast to both Lee and Kashun yet still utilized many themes I felt would work well with a rougher 'raw' style.

I finally decided to settle with the totem theme from Sottsas and the raw style of Lee keeping in mind the functional ware of Kashun.  My original idea was to make a totem of cups using a similar structure of a Sottsass with the addition of a tea pot to complete the set.  During the process of building the piece I decided I needed two.  Both with a similar structure but subtle differences.  Another project cracked enough in the kiln so it would not fit together any more (the mushroom).  I decided to flip the mushroom cap upside down and place the cup portion of the totem on top.