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HI Art Magazine, a magazine for Hawaiian Art




 

 

 

 

 

 

In traditional societies, the teaching and learning of art occurred in the process of apprenticeship– an extended work/training program in which established artists communicated the skills of their craft while receiving valuable support from trainees. Often, both the professional artist’s work process and studio itself, was designed with this system in mind. Aspects of the creative process were delegated to assistants, who gradually accumulated the various skills required by the profession, and thus became more and more valuable to their employer, until they’d finally acquired the requisite skills to embark on their own independent business ventures.

 
 
The Big Island Studio Cooperative
 (BISC) has endeavored to create a program of apprenticeship, utilizing methods and techniques for making original ceramic products. The process offers opportunity for learning while apprentices participate in producing a professional level of completed works. These teachers have engaged the creative minds of a small group in the manufacture, design and marketing of art works relevant to their own community. The world view of individual participants is expressed in the context of shapes and forms.
 

 

Three methods we use in pottery are hand building, wheel throwing, and press molding. In these two vessels all three skills are demonstrated:

 

  

Beginners’ wheel thrown forms have been pressed into a mold based upon a traditional Japanese bottle form. Basic hand building techniques combine the many small wheel thrown vessels into a composition which unifies the memories of the wheel and of the hand, within a classical form.

 

Wheel throwing works by centrifugal force. The first vessels anyone throws tend to flare out into small bowl forms. These tiny bowls were hand trimmed and offered as vehicles for graphic molten glass compositions, each one a tiny experiment in technique and aesthetics. In developing competent large scale wheel throwing technique, the miniature vases offer quick repetitions at low investment of time as a second step in the process.
 


 

   
 
Many of the elements of motif in art tend to derive from the natural environment of the artist. The iconic leaf form can become a cliché, but in the context of the rawness and ruggedness of the clay used, and framed by the preordained vessel shape it becomes a familiar element in a personal composition.
   
 
Simply transforming the imprint of a natural object into a functional vessel (in this case a plate) is a beginning study in handling the material of clay, and in framing a composition from nature into an unexpected context.
 
   

 

 
This large jardinière, of no specific ethnicity has been constructed in mold form as a ‘negative canvas’ upon which an artist, having developed sophisticated skills and practiced aesthetic concerns, might paint or print in three dimensions, expressing the nature of materials in a series of personal variations upon a theme.

 

  More examples of works by Big Island Studio Cooperative are pictured below.
 

 

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