Katherine Glenday | Porcelain Ceramic Artist

I began to draw again seriously this year, mainly as a way of staying quiet and attentive to the present moment. The activity of drawing with its silence and acute observation at first seemed to be a meditative thing to do rather than with the aim of presenting this work along with my ceramic expressions.

When I was frequently exhorted to keep on and to present this work, I began so tentatively, knowing that my ‘real work’ is another sort of painting and constitutes another way of making my observations visible. With clay I work with alchemy, with ‘paint’, with fluid speed and with movement. Drawing on paper made me feel that I was presenting the fact that if I was wanting to simply draw, I would have been doing this all this time… but I realized that perhaps it was important to draw attention to the fact that the basis of my work with porcelain, was based on acute observation.

(It felt like a step backwards in many ways for the sake of communicating something.)

Having said that, drawing is a joy because what I put on the paper is there and it stays there. I can do it away from my wheel and kiln… so I can travel a bit more and work when I go to beautiful places.

Of course I do find that I am constantly scratching at the paper and wanting to layer the surface … and often put the paper against the light so that I can see the layers and the translucency! – but all in all giving time to drawing and painting again has been one of the gifts of 2009.