Oysters ate Rob
Better a bite on the foot
than the knob
Simon Cumming's
Hairy stick
Eating weed
and smoking dick
Stoking stallion
Fixed the tap
Wasted clay
with hooky crap
Seraphine Dream
Painting queen
Kissed a pot and
made it scream
Karl Fritsch
Kiln bitch
Made a sink
Pretty stink
Lisa love beads
Plays ‘The Game’
Super powered
Wadding pain
Drunken Sarah
Aunty Shearer
Gerard's stench
drawing nearer
Francis dances
through the room
There is no dust
where there's a broom
Ford's hordes
Gypsy shit
Making light
in darkest pit
Differ Cult
Whiskey salt
Tippy flowers
on the vault
Thank you Sam
for your safe hands
And Frederick too
for being glue
And thank you Barry
In your death
You were the lungs
we are your breath.
]]>Inspiration is no more a solution than an idea is a product. Inspiration is a fart and a diamond. Inspiration is not a thing that can be bought off the shelf and applied. It is not a shit in the grass waiting to be stood on. How many unicorns have you caught lately? You may have to improve your hunting skills to catch the thing you want. Most people don’t lack inspiration but the initiative to act upon it. This is why motivational books don't usually work. If you had the answer would you use it? The petrol is not the car. Open a fucking window.
Ideas are made, they do not come from nothing. Nothing comes from nothing. Ideas come from experiences. Boring ideas come from boring experiences etc etc. Fuck mindfulness. Mindfulness is an old tool to stop monks getting erections. Searching for ideas is like looking for your own eyeballs. Ideas are a busy brain’s sweat. Move it. Have better experiences. Abandon your hopelessly boring life. Buy an ostrich, adjust your gender, eat a rattlesnake’s arsehole. If you spend all your time doing tedious shit in a vacuum of your own flatulence then you deserve the lobotomy you’ve given yourself. Still can’t think of any good ideas? Steal someone else's. Smart people don’t care. I’m only sharing this to make room for the next lot. Everybody copies everything everyday. That's how i’m writing this now. Originality stems more often from a bad translation than a sudden epiphany. Ideas are the progeny of ideas. You don’t need to own the tree to eat the fruit.
Plan less, pot more, start now. Embrace uncertainty; it lets you know you are going in the right direction. Lean into it laughing. Don’t give yourself the luxury of time to rationalise a plan, you’re a chatty chimp rocketing through infinite space on a damp rock. Reality is a fucking mess. Stop looking for answers. Ideas are questions.
Stop hiding behind your limitations. Embrace the skills you have. If you want to get better practise more - or shut up. Stop paying people like me to teach you shit that's free on youtube. I’m just pretending to like you. Teach yourself to learn first. Hierarchy of technique in pottery makes as much sense as racism. The earliest pots were made with spit, piss and a stick. Mastery is useful but not necessary and has its own problems. Clinging to a tradition or technique can be as much of a barrier as having no skills at all. I’ve noticed that kids have no problem coming up with great ideas for making inspirational pottery and yet they have no training, no special skills or tools or aspirations. They are not yet concerned about the opinions of their friends and family. They make a blob and call it a poo frog. Everybody laughs and has a good time.
Don’t make things that other people think are valuable. Make something that means something to you today not something that might mean something to someone else tomorrow. Fuck them, they can make their own pots. Make things that you are interested in. Value is fleeting, seasonal, subjective and not your problem. This isn't a letter to economists. Eat your fucking money! What happens after the pot is made is not pottery, so don’t worry about it. There is no such thing as a bad pot, only someone else's opinion of it. Never let a talking sausage ruin your buzz. The smell of freshly cut grass reminds me of summer.
Anything in your head is yours - take it.
]]>There is an ancient madness to porcelain: Porzellankrankheit. This is a rock to die for unless you don't want too. It is the most valuable mud in the world and the cheapest. Discount store Buddha. Toilet Bowl. Teeth. Madness is scary because it is without edges. There is nothing to stop you falling, no fences, no moat, no made-up morality. Surrendering to madness is risky, it is the false elation of perceived freedom, an escape from the prison of reality, a beautiful ice bullet in the face. But madness is also beautiful too.
Covid returns like bleeding teeth. Today's pots are a stupid waste of time. Porcelain mines bake Chinese children so I can stick dicks on a silly dragon. Our legacy is waste. If I was the Earth I'd try and kill us too. This clay moves like almond icing: spreading, dropping, blank faced, emotionless. Christmas after the recent death of a parent. It is almost edible in its flaccid tactility. Porcelain is space food for sad astronauts. Unlike my usual wild clays it's hard to even think of this tooth paste as clay. It is another medium with different rules of which I know nothing.
It is surprisingly pleasant to be incapable enough to have to beg together a pot. I am more masterbator than master. I am a creepy child playing with unicorn shit in a shed. There are many ways to ruin a perfectly good pot but the two easiest are stabbing a hole in it or affixing a rouge penis. The less context the better. These latest pots are dick heavy for no reason other than self sabotage. Dicking a pot is the laziest form of retail suicide. Drinking alone in a bar full of bellicose tradesmen writing an explanation for the shameless dicking of my seemingly useless pottery seems risky. I've reached a new pinnacle or a new low. Shitness in art is always a question of aesthetics. Ironically a bar full of rough men is terrified to violence by peni. I blame the awkwardness of penis's on the invention of pants. Prior to that it was no weirder than a Swiss army knife on a belt. Admittedly carrying a pocket knife today is the international sign of the pedophile. I am not advocating for enforced naturalism just reflecting on the rich history of hidden appendages. I don’t think many people view the wearing of underpants as an attack on their civil liberty and yet for many, being asked to wear a face mask in a pandemic is a step too far. Perhaps a compromise could be wearing underwear on your face? Dick head.
]]>Rubbish budgie
Feeling judgie
Sentence the cat to death.
Cat seez no!
Don’t call me bro,
Repeal transparent flesh.
]]>Making goblets and an ashtray. I never thought I'd have cause to make an ashtray in my lifetime. All the smokers I know have either quit or died. It felt like fashioning a noose for a stranger. Nina Simone blissfully revisited. A harrowing black angel fills the pottery with an aching for justice. Sometimes I find the suffering of others cathartic. It's certainly great potting music. I adore the freedom of the studio. Safe from hokey pokey wokey dokey politics. Right wing wankers, left wing spankers, centralist cock fags and bitches. It is a great privilege to be able to think and speak freely. Nothing is sacred. Veneration is a hidey hole for bigots. Spew forth your truth and let me taste your tolerance. An inability to listen is more dangerous than an inability to speak. Jack Knives Splatter.
I miss the lockdown. Those months of isolation tore away the superficial busyness of my life. More hanging out with the kids and going to the beach. I realised how much of my life I spent doing shit I don't actually give a fuck about. I generally find most people dreadfully boring. Not you of course, the other people. The tedium of trivial drama eats at my pickled tiger penis energy. It is probably better for me to take up smoking than associate with sheeple. School pickups. Supermarket shopping. Sportswear mummies and the fucking mall. Frankly I'd rather choke to death than pretend to give a rat's cunt about elastic pants. I get it, you're fat but you want to feel athletic. Plastic porridge sacks strain lower backs. I'm a little overweight myself at the moment. I can tell because I get breathless putting my shoes on. I'm not exactly sure how I gained the weight but I suspect it may have something to do with my poor, high fat diet and not doing any exercise at all, ever. I bought a chin up bar but because I'm so fat it's impossible to use. Imagine an obese, toothless tyrannosaurus rex trying to do a pull up on a tree branch with its tiny weak arms and massive sugary undercarriage. Elastic pants are a licence to be lazy. I am still wearing maternity pants and my youngest child is nine and I don't even have a womb. I am a fat lazy bastard who identifies as a vegan endurance athlete. If it helps you should know that I’m writing this while day drinking alone at the pub.
Original sin
Let me begin
Drinking gin
From a binge
Cringe
Vomit in your fringe
More important Information: I am definitely going to hell and not just for fat shaming either. I've also been making pottery pipes and it's like working at a suicide factory for cowards. Being asthmatic has prevented me from truly embracing smoke culture but as a fire aficionado I have always felt a bit robbed. I think I would be an excellent smoker given a chance. I've got all the moves. Smoking is so cool and so dangerous. With fifty percent of smokers dying from smoke related disease you've actually got a higher chance of survival playing Russian roulette. I'd be happy with fifty percent myself but because of my asthma issue it's more like one hundred percent and I just feel like there's less painful ways to kill yourself. Imagine if tea was as lethal as smoking. Imagine if smoking was a combat sport. Regardless, if I ever get a terminal illness I'm definitely taking up smoking. Bung lung bums smoking gun.
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