Anne Moar came in with an object as beautiful as it was strange. It immediately made me think of dead corrals, or bird bones or dried lichen or some other mineral left over of an organic life-form, even though it was strictly industrial. The funny thing is that its look probably didn’t influence its design very much at all, but rather that the ideal form for it to fulfil its intended function just called for a slender, fragile and organic shape.

This is what it looks like already mounted on my sculpture.

The thing is one of the  ceramic elements or flues for directing the gas flow in a gas fired open fireplace, its curved and irregular shape probably helped produce a nicely irregular fire. Since its shape had been so happily shaped by its function, I wanted to turn it into a new object whose form was also subservient to what it could do, but still beautiful for it. I decided to follow my association to sea creatures or alien life-forms, which got me thinking how we can blow a tune in a shell, and then it took off and became an instrument.

You don’t blow into the fireplace flue, but it supports a string.

Building up a body for it I worked in clay, shaping an ocarina style base that apart from working as a flute also held a thin string suspended from the original ceramic element. The tricky thing with ocarinas is that the tuning derives from the relationship between the total volume of its inner chamber to the total size of its openings (covering one or more openings changes their total size which produces different tones). I managed to shape the clay until it produced a couple of clean notes, of which one was satisfyingly deep and merman like, but firing clay also shrinks it, slightly changing the relationships which my tuning had depended on, and throwing it all out off balance. Sadly the sounds coming out of the finished piece were not as clear and crisp anymore, but I guess they did sound more alien and strange. How do they do it, how does anyone manage to tune an ocarina correctly? I don’t get it.

Maybe more tactile and auditory than visual?

Object no. 23