Here it is, now available in paperback on Amazon UK.

Sennett is a sociologist and as such refers to many sociological studies in the text, but also to philosophical and psychological sources. He was a student of the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who in turn was a student of Martin Heidegger.

“The Craftsman” is written in a very clear, flowing and readable format, maybe due to the author also being a public intellectual, and well practiced in speaking and presenting concepts without being needlessly obscure or verbose. In the book Sennett explores what it means to be a craftsperson.  As examples he cites not just artists but people from across all fields (including computer programming and the NHS) who like to do work well for its own sake and who combine – in his words -  “hand and head” and “problem solving with problem finding”. He leads an insightful discussion about what inspires people to take pride in their work and how this affects the economy as well as the individual’s feeling of self worth, what shapes larger society’s views and reactions to craftspersonship, and why this type of work is unique and valuable to society.

Richard Sennett has a very good website which you will find a link to here. He also was interviewed on BBC4, together with Turner Prize winning ceramic artist Grayson Perry on a program titled “Thinking Allowed”. The interview aired in February 2008 and is no longer available on the BBC4 website, but here is a link to it on Richard Sennett’s website.

Firstly I’ve been closeted away working on my theory. This is quite a challenge to me, since it’s the first time in my life that I’ve been required to write such long essays. The MPhil at the ANU SoA requires two 6000 word essays and one 10000 word studio report. This might not seem like much to the average student who is used to essay writing, but believe me, it is a personal challenge to the art student who hasn’t written an essay since the year 2000.

I think the biggest hurdle has been to come up with a coherent and focused question actually, as my interests range far and wide. Space is a wide field (no pun intended). In honour of this undertaking, I have set up a new theory page, and you will notice the permalink in the top bar of this blog. My essay is not there, but links to my research resources are, and I talk a bit about my thought processes. It might be of interest to someone else looking at issues of spacial representation in ceramics, and its only a beginning, so I’ll add to it as I have time.

Secondly, I’ve added a couple of new links to the side bar. One for an excellent online resource for ceramic artists called Ceramics Today . Ceramics today is site run and edited by Australian ceramic artist Steven Goldate – although at this stage I’m not entirely certain whether he is still involved in pursuing new articles. Nether-the-less, the articles already there are really fantastic. The other is a link to James Steele’s blog. James is a PhD student at the ANU SoA and is working on a project to do with mapping space with user generated images, ie photographs taken by members of the public. I find this fascinating because of the cross-over between two dimensional and three dimensional space that such a project examines.

And last but not least. I wanted to ask advice/ opinions from anyone who might read this. Last year I gave a talk at the ANU as part of my work in progress seminar. In that paper, I talked about my influences and one of them was a particular American ceramic artist, whose work I had seen at the last NCECA conference I attended in the USA.

During the conference I took a photograph of a piece of hers in the gallery space where it was exhibited. I made sure that photography was allowed in the gallery. Then I wrote an abstract for my talk and published it on this blog. I included the photograph.

After quite a few months I got an email from her telling me that the piece is under copyright and she wants me to remove the photograph. I removed the photo and wrote to the artist apologizing, but also explained that I thought that since I was the photographer, I had honestly thought that the copyright for that image was mine. I also explained that this blog was being used for educational purposes, to document my studies. I asked if she had any other images of her work I could use in my abstract without breaching copyright.

She didn’t get back to me.

Now, I realize that I probably should have asked her permission before I used the photo on my blog. I did contact her a while before this incident asking for images of her work and she told me to look in a book. There was only one image in the book and it was quite dated, and I think that using images scanned from a book on a blog would be more likely to breach copyright than using images I took with my own camera.

What should I have done? Do I own copyright on photos I took, or is the copyright to those images owned by the person who made the work? This blog is not commercial, I don’t make money from advertising. Is copyright different for blogs like this? Does anyone know the laws/ rights for the artist and the blogger in such a case? What do other bloggers do when they use images of work by other people? Do you ask every single person before you use an image of their work?

Many thanks to anyone who is willing to discuss this issue.

Linda Davy, hand built porcelain, terra sigillata 

Opening night reception: Wednesday 5th March, 6pm

If you happen to find yourself in sunny Canberra, Australia, this week, please join the artists, Linda Davy (Graduate Diploma) and Margaret Carlin (Master of Visual Art) for the opening night reception of their graduating exhibition!

This exhibition is the third in the series of the graduate season 2008. It will be held at the ANU School of Art Gallery. The Gallery is located on the ground floor of the ANU School of Art, just next to the cafe, on Ellery Crescent, Acton, ACT, 2601.

If you don’t manage to make it for the drinks and festivities, the exhibition will continue until Friday 14th March, and the opening hours are: Tue-Fri 10.30 – 5pm, Saturdays Noon – 5pm or by appointment, closed public holidays. Phone: 02 6125 5841.

Hope to see you there!

Linda Davy, hand built porcelain, terra sigillata 

My supervisor, and the head of the Ceramics Department at the ANU School of Art, Janet DeBoos, has just had some of her work included in a beautiful new publication from Lark Books: “Masters: Porcelain: Major Works by Leading Ceramists”. Here is a link to it on Amazon UK.

Eucalyptus Tree, burnt during the Canberra bush fires, in January 2003, at Kambah Pool by the Murrumbidgee River.

It is wonderful to catch up with my friends, whom I’ve been missing so much. I’m also really pleased to see my teachers and supervisors, it’s truly amazing to be able to speak with them face to face. So many questions that I’ve been grappling and struggling with all semester, finally answered, in some cases in the space of two minutes flat.

Also, many obligations discovered, like, my WIPs, which are part of every graduate student’s yearly ritual. I’ll be presenting mine on Thursday 6th of March at 3pm. These are the very first ones in the graduate season this year. I’ll be presenting both my theory and studio work in progress on Thursday. The working title is:

Interpreting the reality of the virtual
from an art practice perspective.

The WIPs will be held in the CSA lecture theater and are open to all ANU School of Art staff and students. Here is a little blurb pertaining to the direction of my new, planned work:

In ceramics, we speak about the internal space of objects in terms of containment – the empty negative space inside the walls of an object, whether it is functional or sculptural. A space that is ready to receive something – be it something physical such as a liquid, or a concept such as feelings or memories – something metaphorical.

Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Nine Tables), 1998
Concrete and polystyrene.

It is internal space which mostly makes up the volume that pushes out against the external world, for instance your fingers, as you hold something, like a tea bowl.

There are interesting physical characteristics that ceramic objects can take on – such as two objects of the same volume can appear like one holds more volume than another, or one can seem lighter than another, despite being the same weight.

When talking about the virtual, we also talk about space – cyberspace, virtual space. Yet what is it? It isn’t space as we understand it, in a physical sense. You can’t fill it up with tea. Yet you can, as a conceptual space, fill it up with a representation of yourself, your knowledge, feelings or memories, your fantasies – or a representation of tea, if you so desire.

“Just because something is not material does not mean it is unreal” writes Margaret Wertheim in “The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace”

Virtual space doesn’t take up any actual space in our world. You might say it takes up space in the cables that connect our routers to each other, or on a server, or, more specifically, on a hard disk. Yet when you examine the hard disk, there doesn’t appear to be any space on it to take up.

Marek Cecula, Interface Set III, 2001.
Vitreous China, gold and wood. 23 x 20 x 11cm

All the time, hard disks are getting smaller, yet somehow they have more of this space available. The thin hard disk in my computer doesn’t seem nearly voluminous enough to carry the masses of letters and photographs, music and videos that make up my research and entertainment, the documentation of my life, for the last several years. Yet it is.

The machine itself (a bunch of small, rather uninteresting little black things with legs, a bit like insects, packaged in a white box with a screen and keyboard) somehow works as a translator, an interface that converts my life archives into something that I can understand and process with my senses. Into something that I can interact with.

In my new work, I’m interested in the concept of containment of virtual space. More precisely, I’m interested in the edge of this space, like the lip of the bowl. What happens where the virtual space and the real space interface? Can we touch it? Can it touch us? How is virtual reality REAL?