My grandmother's hands finally came out right on the 4th firing and I cried in the studio
Ok so I've been trying to make this piece since maybe February. Small figure, just the hands really, cupped like she holds them when she's watching her telenovelas. Nothing fancy. My abuela's hands.
The first one exploded in the bisque. Second one the fingers slumped into each other, looked like a paw. Third one I glazed too thick and it came out looking like it was wearing gloves, which is the opposite of the whole point.
Opened the kiln this morning and there they were. Still a bit off, the left thumb is shorter than real life and I'm not touching it. But the position is right. The weight of them is right.
I don't know why I'm posting this here except that I've been telling everyone for months that I "make figurative work" like it's a category on a form, and this is the first time I actually felt it. I called her and she said "bueno, y por qué lloras" like it was nothing, and then she stayed on the phone for 40 minutes.
If you're 6 months into something and it keeps failing, it might just be a firing problem. Or it might be you have to make it 4 times.
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Four firings is not stubbornness, it's just what it costs sometimes. The glazed one sounding like gloves is funny and also exactly the problem of the whole piece, no? You're trying to get at a specific pair of hands and the surface keeps lying about them.
I work in print, so my failures are cheaper and more repeatable, but I know that thing where you stop after the version that is slightly wrong because it finally has the weight. The short thumb is the good part, honestly. Perfect hands look like nobody's.
Perfect hands look like nobody's. Yeah. I keep a box of the rejects and half of them are more honest than what I ended up showing. The third one sounding like gloves is the whole reason to keep it around, honestly, that's the piece telling you where the line is.
the thumb thing. my brother's hands were messed up at the end, knuckles all wrong, and the first thing I made from his stuff I threw out because it looked too tidy. second one I kept. it's uglier and it's him.