The definition of insanity
As I commenced “The Big Build” yesterday on my most ambitious porcelain project to date, I turned to one of my fellow students.
“I have spent the past ten weeks casting 500 tiny porcelain heads. Now it comes time to build with them, and I don’t even know if they’ll structurally hold. If it does work, I’ll be left with one sphere, which may or may not look any good. If it doesn’t work, I’ll just be left with 500 broken porcelain heads. Is that the definition of insanity?”
My sage fellow student replied…
“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result”.
Nothing ever summed up my artistic practice so well!
With a bit of surreptitious googling, I discovered that this quote is attributed to Albert Einstein. Well, right on, Albert!
Am I doing the same thing over and over again? Yes. But at the end of the Big Build I expect a different outcome. Fingers crossed.
In the meantime, pictures from day one and two:
What is that ungodly mess? That’s what 498 porcelain heads look like before they’re all stuck together.
The build commences! The first 6 heads cradled in my chubby pink hand.
The end of day one. A respectable start…
Et voila! At the end of day two, the bottom half…
And the top half!
And here’s the world’s dodgiest 7-second time lapse video of the build, considerably shorter than the twelve hours it took in real life!
Fingers crossed my latest project survives the drying process…
[...] written a lot about porcelain on this blog already. Here, and here, and here, and here, among others. And you can expect a lot more from here. I start in earnest at [...]