SEAGROVE, North Carolina — We’ve profiled Daniel Johnston and his large vessels project before on CFile. A few days ago the artist posted this video to his Facebook page, showing himself, and assistants Charlie Hayes, Cole Brown and Andrew Dutcher making ten massive pots in just one day.
The marathon workday is condensed to two minutes for your convenience.
The pots will be a part of the installation Tower 866-885 at Mahler Fine Arts (Raleigh, September 15 – October 20). About 30 large pottery vessels in a structure that evokes a rural shrine, a teahouse or the shell of a massive kiln will be part of the installation, according to the Mahler. They quote Johnston:
“The environments I create for the pots are very much about the places we call home, the temporary structures we rest in and that for our own psychological well-being we think of as permanent. We construct buildings – objects, if we are being objective. We call some of them Home, we call some of them Work. We, as humans, fundamentally need the security of the structure to exist. The structures I make have as much to do with this sense of security as with the vulnerability of the actual impermanence of architecture and our own existence. When I built my first house, I realized that at the moment I laid the first board on the foundation blocks, the decaying process had begun. Putting my ceramic vessels in a temporary architectural space is much like placing them in the houses we live in, surrounding the permanence of the human spirit with an ephemeral structure.” — Daniel Johnston
Keep an eye on this show. It looks like Johnston and crew have been pushing themselves to superhuman feats to pull it off.
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