Porcelain is the softest smoothest most sensual of all clays. It has an ethereal otherworldly quality. Its lightness makes you want to pick it up. Its smoothness is skin like and seductive. I love its vibrant white ground which shows off slips and glazes like no other clay.
In China they don’t even call porcelain “clay”. They call it Cí, which does not translate into a western word. Porcelain is a French word meaning “cowrie shell”, a shell that has the luster of porcelain and was used as currency by traders who shipped Cí. In the US we call porcelain “china” which is weird, and gives you a sense of my first few weeks of being lost in translation in Dehua, China where I was an Artist in Residence at The Blanc de Chine.
Within my first 12 hours of arriving in China I was introduced to the man that would guide me for the next month and a half, Master Lin, the warmest most sensitive person an exhausted newbie like myself could encounter.
Holding Master Lins tea cup.
Guanyin statue that stands by the Chanxi River, Dehua