Ceramics by Trudes Tango, Photos by Duncan Green
Trudes:
I am drawn to working with clay because of its transformative nature. It changes drastically at each stage -- from its wet, raw, supple beginnings, to its brittle, powdery, leather hard stage, to its final form after it has been annealed by the fire, becoming vitrified, strong, but still breakable.
In these pieces, I wanted to push the clay to its limits -- throwing slabs of clay on different hard surfaces over and over until the clay was altered and stretched sometimes to the point of tearing apart, almost to the point of too much. Until the clay was left with scars and wounds that could be beautifully accentuated by oxide washes and glazes.
Duncan:
I think of these photos as "dream-glimpses". There is a bunch of them in a clump on one wall, and they're meant to be seen together, in no particular sequence, but in relationship to each other. The images in a night of dreams may seem non-sequiters to the conscious mind, but taken together form a gestalt impression that holds perhaps some ineffable meaning, some shred of memory, some faint scent of the ungraspable...
