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With clay I create membranes to wrap the void.
The earth-clay which I mold becomes an extension of my own body.
By transforming my material, I transform myself.
By going to the limits of my material’s possibilities, I approach closer to my own limits.
Website: www.theochorafas.eu
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WELCOME MY StrAngels 2015
These forms appeared to me as an automatic writing. At first glance they seemed strange to me but I embraced them as creatures that decided to enter my world, not fully expressed yet but announcing a new reality.
Thus, I gave all my care to beautify them, painstakingly decorating their “skin”, affirming their legitimity.
Stoneware covered with colored terra sigillata, raku fired at 1050 C. Larger size around 30cm.
UNDO 2009-2016
Undo my pieces as soon as I have finished them.Then mourn the world of forms I have created.Grief and tears...
But in the fluidity of the countless pieces of clay I preciously collect, lies the seed of a world of new possibilities.
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FLOWING EARTH - FLOWING BOWLS 2010-2012
A chance mishap during firing and my forms, up to then geometrical and planned, get distorted through overheating. That’s the opportunity to open up in due time, and show more flexibility, more fluidity.
This fluidity percolates progressively into my being and so becomes a life attitude as well as an option for formal expression. I sense a haziness settling in, I plan ahead less and less and rarely decide ahead of time what I would like to create. It is feeling which guides me I don’t perceive any more in the segments I make, the harshness of a painful dismemberment, but rather view them as parts of a large unified whole. This is indeed an option which upsets my balance but it helps me overcome my rigidities. To sway between something and just anything whilst retaining consistency.
FLOWING EARTH
FLOWING BOWLS
Smoked clay, cotton thread, larger size 50cm.
WITHIN-WITHOUT-CHANNELING 2009
To reach the point of fusion between my inner and outer self.
ENCOMPASSING 1999-2016
I always come back to the archetypal ceramic form : the vessel.Whether box, bowl or pitcher, it is that which connects me to clay-ware, that which is recognizableby all.
The object I shape here is first and foremost functional, practical. As its symbolical dimensionhas taken second place, I can lightly engage in a game, a variation on a given theme.That’s what my teacher Aline Favre (potter and musician), used to call “ Performing one’smusical scales ”.
Often, at the outset, I set down rules. I keep to them as long as they are useful to the evolutionof my forms. But it sometimes happens that these rules lead me to a dead-end, confining meinto a barren system. That’s when I must breach these rules, devise new ones and reactivatethe creative process.
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