Kristine Michael believes that ceramic art is no child’s play. It requires years of hard work, practice and patience to come up with creative designs
Many may not be aware about the subtle difference between pottery and ceramics and it is therefore a common tendency to categorise the two into one. Ceramic artist Kristine Michael explained the difference, “Everything that comes out of the kiln is pottery. When you glaze an earthen or a clay pot with chemicals, it becomes ceramic. The glazing further hardens it and makes it less fragile.”
Kristine chose the path of clay and ceramics consciously because the medium gives an artist the liberty to sense, feel and touch their work. Even its reach is diverse. “There is honesty in clay through which you can truly express yourself,” she said. It is also one of the few arts where one does not run the chance of repeating a previous work and it is extremely difficult to make an exact replica. She added, “Every time you open the kiln to take out the final product there is an element of surprise. It is rare that a figure that you put in come out exactly the same way.”
Finding one’s way with clay is a mechanical one because it involves turning intimate thoughts into something physical and tactile. From understanding the proportion of clay and water to the temperature at which it is to be baked and from glazing that with chemicals to finishing it off, perfection is a long and tedious affair. Controlling the glaze, she mentioned, requires utmost attention because even a second’s delay can ruin the entire thing. Sometimes it takes months to complete. She explained, “The reason why sometimes it takes long is because you need a certain number of objects to put into the kiln. You cannot use the kiln and fire it up to such high temperature only for a few artworks. We need to do that in bulk,” explained the artist at a discussion organised by the lIlA Foundation.
Ceramics is not just pots and bowls. There is certain tranquility that has rendered the art immortal since the Indus Valley civilisations. Even though clay products are fragile, they tend to live on. “Pottery shreds from the Indus Valley are proof that they survive through generations. It is eerie and exciting to touch something that was created by a potter in 1900 BC,” she said and added that the ceramic world had a sense of continuity with the human world. To illustrate, she referred to the every day pot orlota and associated its features with the features of the human body — the foot, belly, shoulder, neck and lip.
The artist who feels privileged to have trained under renowned Indian sculptor Dashrat Patel feels happy at the fact that now students are taking genuine interest in the understanding and the practice of clay art. Kristine also shared that it is more important to train the youngsters in making clay models with hands in the beginning because that creates a strong foundation.
In all her years of work she has dedicated herself in delving into the various possibilities that can come out of it — from animal lidded vessels to a series of figures which depict the various figures and moods of a woman and ceramic murals titled Soul Sisters (inspired by the Mother Goddess of India) to the Serpent Dragon installation at the Garden of Five Senses. “Turning clay models to ceramics gives me creative independence because as clay artists tend to be inarticulate. There has been only one instance when I have used fibreglass as a medium and that, too only because of the height of the figure,” she ended.