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Experimental Clay Workshop at Artist House Vartiosaari (6.-7. June)

Experimental Clay Workshop: Digging, shaping and firing from nature at Artist House, Vartiosaari island (FULLY BOOKED!)

Artist House in Vartiosaari island warmly welcomes you to the first workshop from the speculative nature series focused on CLAY. The workshop is hosted by  artists Monika Czyżyk, Elina Vainio and Eero Yli-Vakkuri who have formed an experimental clay group. The workshop has a DIY approach with a keenness to material experimentation and research. The goal of the workshop is to learn where and how to collect clay from its natural environments. How to clean and work with it. How to build your own ceramic kiln, how to fire it using local area resources as fuel and to enjoy the abundance of energy natural settings provide us. We will also prepare your own ash glazing, to complete a full geoartistic cycle.

Location: Taiteilijatalo, Artist House, from Reposalmentie 1 you can take the sun ferry.

Monday 6th of June. 10:00-18:00 (or as long as it takes). Building a kiln and preparing firewood.

Participants are welcomed with tea, coffee and spring water in the garden of the artist house. The group will share insight to Kurängen spring, a site where clay objects which will be burned in a kiln are prepared from. The group will divide based on their interest. The first half has the opportunity to join a sensual walk and dig or commence work on the kiln.

On the walk participants can either partake on a walk together to the heart of the island. The area with the richest biodiversity and swamp, the rich bacterial microflora allow more rare plant species to grow. From there we will respectfully collect clay. After the walk the clay will be cleared. Tools and stations will be provided. Participants can make their own small objects. The kiln building group will prepare mud-cement and lay bricks to form a functional kiln and prepare a lot of firewood for the next day’s burning session.

Tuesday 7th of June. 10:00 (or as long as it takes). Firing the Kiln We made and forging iron to pass time.

Participants will be welcomed with tea, coffee and spring water in the garden of the artist house. Participants can bring their own dry small objects ready for firing. Note that for the wood firing it is recommended to use more sandy clay. You are welcomed to experiment with glazing ceramics, arranging ceramics in kiln. As soon as the kiln is ready the firing of the ceramics begins. We will use three different techniques of increasing temperature and work on site by adding wood for 6+ hours.

You are welcomed to invent rituals by the fire with us. We can learn a bit about forging using scrap metal bits and rail track for an anvil. During the firing time we will eat a vegan lunch. It will be possible to visit gardens, and some sites in Vartiosaari island. At the end of the day after the ceramics have cooled a bit we will sneak a peak to them and leave them to cool overnight.

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We build a kiln with Elina and Monika. The construction was simple. Old bricks formed a square base for the fire (~40x40x20) with a half-a-brick size vent on the side opposing the opening. Bricks were laid to form a ~60cm shaft and a steel grill built in the middle. We used ceramic tiles on top of the grill to support the ten(ish) items we burned. The shaft was covered with a steel plate to keep the temperature. The opening had a partial brick door and holes in the kiln walls were filled using a clay/sand mixture for insulation. I had small bellow for building up temperature and a electric fan for building high heats (from Jesse).

The firing had three phases. 2 hours low heat using only wood as the fuel (this failed as the temperature rise too fast breaking an item), 2 hours of medium heat with more wood and energy form the bellow pumping up the temperature and 2 hours extreme heat with charcoal and the electric fan for extreme temperatures. We suspect we reached temperatures above 1100°C because a store bought glazing designated for 1050°C we used was burned. Some pieces which were closest to the heat also burned and showed charred glazed like surfaces, indicating the clay turned into lava.

While heating we practised forging using scrap metal bits and rail track for an anvil.

It took a day to build the kiln and prepare the firewood and a day for the firing. The items were left cooling over night. We used various clays and mixtures for the objects but clay from Kurängen spring worked best. We suspect it has sand particles in it which prevent extreme shrinkage, helping the items to not break in the heating. A thick jug I made from clay (partially found from the basin of the spring and three meters north east from it) is thick enough that contains water even without glazing.

We will do a new firing next month for glazing and making new things. For the glazing we’ll use a 1:2 ash and 1:2 clay mixture. The ash is from wood produced by the first burning and the clay from Kurängen. I’m in the process of washing the ash. The recipe and science comes from Phil Berneburg. We’ll build a bigger kiln and aim for a steadier pre-heating phase.

Using clay from a spring, to drink its water completes and begins a ritual a geoartistic-cycle. It feels powerful and I love that the process of preparing clay objects is thoroughly holistic: Using ashes from the first burning for the second burning glazing feels like a gaiaistic design. We also prepared small cups, which I’ll built a wooden tray for. The long term plan is deposit the items submerged into the Kurängen spring water, were they can be used by visitors and forest dwellers. The design of the items is utilitarian. The cups which we made don’t have any straight edges, which works well for the forest as it does not have any straight edges either.

A visit to the spring in long due. I should groom the garden of peat I planted.

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The Threshold (2021) Vasif Kortun. Got passed this by Elina as a good companion to our text in No-Niin. Kortun also addresses the moment when covid turned museums into content-broadcast-stations which were so desperate for audience engagement that they forgot decency. For me, this broke the threshold: Their art became a one-way affair (which made the other side was irrelevant).

Threshold […] is about the conditions of how the two parties—the institution and its audience—begin to trust each other. Not to consent, but to agree to a process of accepting each other as workable partners; not only in the institution’s programs but also in the veracity of the relationship. It is a fluid contract, not a once-and-done deal. It is also not merely about the “offer,” but how the institution acts upon the world, its demeanor, its decency, how it levels with a situation, and how it treats the user as wiser than itself. Absolute parrhesia cannot really be expected, but adopting, growing, and developing this relation into an institution’s output is a must. Otherwise, institutions are just shopping, doing good, and being timely: commoning in the Summer, queering in the Fall, and decolonizing in the Winter.

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Worked as an assistant for Simon Vincenzis FROM THE DEAD AIR ORGY: On The Nature of Things. An intensive gig. I helped in preparing the Roihupelto artist studios into a multichannel live-feed broadcast station. The daily broadcasts lasted only 20 minutes and performers were directed & their actions timed meticulous to execute partially synchronised movements and others gestures. The separate events built up slowly into a consistent mood. As a performance it felt like an ambient artwork. Not a lot of events but what ever it was it occurrent consistently and it didn’t demand an audience. It was made for algorithms and AIs too. There was partial nudity which youtube automatic sensors picked up. Imagine: Youtube has developed an algorithm which can identify penises. It was speculated that this is the most religiously motivated algorithm in existence, an algorithmic model of North-American puritanism and modesty etiquette.

Bought a la-radio (cb-radio to be specific: President Harry 2 Classic) for cheep and planning to build my own antenna for it. The model I got might be suitable for mods. The Slim Jim and J Pole calculator calculator site feels like a good resource for antennae and the cbharraste.info also offers a lot of tips (the site works better on wayback machine). My interest in radio is getting serious. Not sure what it is ultimately about. I’d like to perhaps build a digital radio relay station and I want to make sculptures which work as antennas! They would work well for tuho.org.

Received my M8 unit. Looks and feels lovely. A steep learning curve but making progress. Haven’t tested it with midi gear yet. Found a few useful resources of the M8 discord channel:

  • OctaChainer v1.3.1 Makes suitable slice files as an “Evenly spaced grid”
  • Chordmate3 by impbox. Transcribes chords to m8 FM synth hex. Short memo: Set ALGO to 0B (A+B+C+D) -> Set A, B, … MODs to 1>PIT, 2>PIT, … -> Set MOD1, MOD2, … according the heximal data Chordmate3 displays (example: D-4 00 03 0E 15)
  • m8.uvu.la for making themes.

Still expecting fairchild transistors for my PATHS. They’ve been stuck in Vantaa for two weeks. There was a clearance issue which I had to sort out. Assembled a working Aperture. Setting up a techno rig it seems (the track is pretty much based on Aperture, which supplies the kicks and the squeals). As a filter Aperture gives me the same brain tingles as MS-20. I feel the high resonances in the back of my scull.

Visited the Kurängen spring with Elina Vainio and Monika Czyżyk. We collected clay from the proximity of the spring opening and later prepared a few cups and sculptures from it. We don’t know much about the clay yet but are looking to burn in later this year. The water was clear! I visited the spring in August and removed a canvas from its base. This released mud and soil from under the canvas which contaminated the water. I visited the site later in the month and the water was still murky and undrinkable. I feared I had destroyed the water source (for human use anyway) but proceed planting a few m2 of peat, turf and moss I sourced from a swampy patch higher up in the forest valley (the entire affair reminded me of Land-Values).

I attached the patchwork quilt peat-slices using wooden anchors (tree branches), so that they could stick to the spring base (it floats) and establish roots which could contain the soil. While working on site I spotted two frogs (I drained the 200 litre spring to attach the peat). While visiting the spring early October the water appeared to be cleansed! I could see some parts of the turf in the middle of the spring had turned grey (possibly died) but as the water in the spring is clear, light can access the base and the plants can grow further. We spotted two tadpoles. The water tasted like a mild forest tea. Good and as cold as ever. The forest skin (peat, turf and moss) transfer method seems to work.

The placement of the canvas had formed caveats to the forest base and sledges to the west side of the spring opening. This side appear prone for erosion. I will continue investigating if the west ledge of the spring should be reworked. The north-east side looks equally troubling. The canvas placement has made the spring too deep, like a bathtub of sorts, from where the access water is released into a very muddy swamp opening. I think the spring base should be somehow lifted higher to prevent the water from swamp opening from keeping contact with the water in the spring.

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The Mazizone local network archive I’ve been setting up for my Raspi3+ is stable and working well. I have occasional problems connecting to it and I need to “forget” the network to reset certificates. But this only happens when I’m login in and out intensively for tweaks & edits. The device reboots daily to prevent these kinds of clogs. I haven’t gotten Gammu (to produce daily status updates via sms) working but with the reboot cycle enabled I’m confident that the device will run well enough.

I build the sound archive using wordpress and it looks fresh. Using wordpress in Mazi causes issues with the network url but this is manageable (it redirects visitors to portal.mazizone.eu which is ok for me). I’m now planning to build a funky case for the device and to make an inviting sign which will guide visitors to the network and archive. While making the website I got the idea of using ornamental patterns as illustrations. I also used ornaments in the eurorack case I build for the trip. When I was designing the case I tough the Byzantine style decorations as a reference to early natural sciences (which my work on mineral waters touches). This spawned the idea to add ornamental figures to the thumbnails of the sound files in the archive.

Each sound file (53) has a unique photo assigned to it. The photos set a mood for the content and give a hint of the sound. Photos were shot during our train trip by Iona Roisin, Elina Vainio and Miina Hujala. On top of each photo is a layer of different ornamental shapes. They twirl around the thumbnail corners and interact with things and people in the images. I’ve used Kid3 to add the images to the .wav files. If I’ve understood correctly .wav’s don’t have thumbnails but Kid3 manages to embed the data anyway. The default wordpress media playlist widget can source the images from the files and display them next to the track info.

Now there are ornaments everywhere!

I like over the top ornaments which have an abundance of detail. In Russia I can spot them everywhere. They are used in architecture (Corinthian pedestals and window frames), street lamps, fonts, advertisements, jewelry and clothes. Sometimes the patterns look familiar. Shapes I’ve seen in Russia appear to fuse Byzantine style decorations with folk ornaments I worked with during my carpentry studies. I can recognize a patterns being identical to a traditional woodcarving I’ve seen in Finland. Pirtanauhat and kauluslaudat are good examples.

I guess ornaments appeal to me because they link traditional Finnish crafts with Byzantine history and even contemporary Islamic and Arabic cultures. We visited a folk culture museum in Kazan and many of the Islamic artifacts in the collection looked similar stuff I’ve seen in Finnish folk culture museums (particularly the wooden objects). Some of the clothes looked like something my mother would want to wear. Styles I link to Bedouin folk gowns that are decorated with coins, felt really similar to Russian military uniforms which are decorated with medallions.

The ornaments I’m using for the archive and the thumbnails remind me of weeds. I think they link the archive to “ruins” which Miina is interested in. I think ornaments should be read as celebration of decay. They simulate nonhuman futures by imagening how plant life will take over architecture. They feel like archaic glitch art! Sometimes ornaments in clothes look like roots or blood vessels. I think Scandinavian design aesthetic read ornaments as a vanity but if we approach them as a celebration of decay there is nothing vane in embracing them. I hate Scandinavian design because it makes me feel ashamed of my appetite for details.

Using ornaments to decorate a sound archive, which is difficult to access – Feels right and embedding weed-like ornaments inside metadata makes sense. Here is a low-resolution sample of what the archive looks like when browsed using a mobile phone.