Walking the Gray Area

Hello Dani…

I was on a little trip to the UK since last week.  Now I am back where I was before.  I bought a book called Universe on the ferry from Calais to Dover, depciting images from cosmos, planets, stars and nebulae.  Amazing colours swirl around on every photograph, encaplsulating an ancient magic and mystery of the universe that makes me feel so small, tiny, microscopic.  I had to buy this book because of the image I posted to you earlier last month, to which you posted the fetus and the planets.  We are so small that it nearly makes me laugh when I think about the problems that humans face.  We inhabit the Earth, moslty asleep and ignorant, confused, scared and I think that we have no clue at all.  At least I don’t have a clue.  No clue.

…………….

Hi Dani….

There is no internet in my house anymore and I don’t know when it will be fixed.  Just to let you know if I am very quiet………

-Sebastian

Sebastián!

I missed you!

And thought about the absence, the lack of something, the emptiness, the beginning  of something, of universe, of life…

Memory traces.

Clues.

This image is a first clue to you.

Hello Dani!

OK, I am connected again.  Good.  That makes things easier (to gather clues).  I will get back to you by Sunday.

Have a lovely weekend.

B Y E

Hi Dani….

Not having internet access these days feels very strange, like a body part is missing, and getting on with things in the usual way is not really possible.  So I am grateful that I am connected again and that we can continue blogging our thoughts here.  You gave me a clue.  I have been trying to figure out what is written there.  I keep on looking at it and my mind really wants to know, it just wants the mystery to end as soon as possible so it can move on.  I think that this is sad really (and I appologize to you on behalf of my mind).  Maybe I need the mystery to stay alive and perhaps that is how I see the clue, not figuring things out and leaving the mystery/the unknown exactly where it was in the first place, untouched and pure (…..aaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh, my mind screams in agony!).

I have a hangover now.  I went out for a few drinks last night and now I feel a bit rough around the edges.  But it was worth it, to emerge from my modern hibernation cave and to make physical contact with the real world, with real people.  I think I mentioned to you before, but I find myself in a general gray area in my life.  What previously was only concerned with jewellery has now spread to all areas of [my+life], which can be a bit frustrating at times.  UNDER CONSTRUCTION.  I used to love making jewellery, but in some way, this is fading, slowly becoming transparent to the light and something else is beginning to shine through, yet I cannot make out what this is yet.  But I did start some tests and experiments yesterday (see photo).  Not sure what will come out of this, but hopefully some beautiful white crater-like-glaze-surface-of-the-moon results.  I love experimenting and if I wasn’t making jewellery, I would have been a chef because I think that cooking uses the same kind of energy, at least for me.

Last year I made a collection of work called Hadal Realm.  The Hadal Realm, or Hadal Zone, is the deepes part of the ocean, where cold pressurised darkness prevails and all the debris from the colourful world above rains down.  I thought that this and the human subconscious mind have a lot in common.  This year I was going to start a new collection, but as my passion is fading, I just made some addition pieces.  This picture is of some of the tests, experiments, left-overs, materials, things, bits, fragments, ideas, thoughts, etc.

Now you know a bit more about how I tick…….

-Sebastian

How are you, Sebastián?

I had to leave a few days to finish a job that has occupied much of my time and that has nothing to do with jewelry …
But here I am … In fact I never went away, at least mentally!
I always thought about our conversations and in a few words you wrote in your last pass through here as “body part is missing”, “mystery / unknown”, “under construction”.
The clue that I sent you has to do with it all!

I enjoyed seeing your universe of stuff  “in progress”. I recognized several objects that inspire me, as the queen of hearts with no face and the skull… The clockwise , naked … I also liked the shells … I was curious and my eyes was scrutinizing each of these objects and shells … I was also intrigued by the gray rocks. They are pieces of your “gray area”?

Clue 2:

Hey!

You are back with a bang.  I know that sometimes we need to leave the world of the blog and live outside of it.  But you most certainly have made up for lost time with your new posts.  A lot of images and things to see and look at.  You seem to a be a very prolific worker (kind of reminds me of me and how I can have nothing on one day and a whole collection one week later — allowing an electric creative current to move through you).

Did you find my address as a comment on one of the previous posts?  Wanted to check and see.

Now my gray stones are covered with white and gray surface layers and one, in particular, interests me very much.  I am using it to make some new work (of these pieces called Encrusterium).  See image below.

About the rest of the stuff on the other photo (with the queen of hearts, the skull, etc).  Maybe these are more pieces of my gray area, abstract things, fragments, etc, without necessary cohesion and sense.  Everything can be analyzed, but that is something I am moving away from, to allow the msytery and the unknown to remain in tact………

More later, until then, I hope you have a cozy and happy Sunday!

Hello, Sebastián!

Thank you for your address!

Today I was on the beach…So nice! Blue sky and many shells, one more beautiful than the other. All of them with stories to tell us,  silently.

Have a lovely week!

I love Mondays.  And you?

Hi…!

I like Mondays as much as Tuesdays and the rest of the week.  Throughout my life, Sundays have been the worst as far as I remember.  They used to be dead, hot days of nothing, lingering, waiting for the night to come, to sleep and then to be woken up to go to school (I don’t think that I liked school–I always wondered why I had to go to this place that just forces you to memorize things for test and exams, you had to do well, otherwise your parents wouldn’t be happy, and then one day, just like that, you are free to roam the world and then you do everything in your power to become the exact opposite of the image that ‘school’ placed in your head).

Hi Dani.

Nice to see what your week (your calendar) looks like.  I think that my calendar, at the moment, would have the same image printed seven times, more or less.  Not much changes on a day to day basis (at least not on the surface).  I still have a whole table full of ‘work in progress’ pieces.  As much as I would like to work in full power mode, I also know that this is not how it is right now and therefore I care for the ‘lame snail’ work mode I am in (little by little, bit by bit).  Instead I have been making a lot of (green) papaya salad.  It is Thai and made from unripe papaya.  Have you tried it?  It is my newest obsession and now I can make it easily and effortlessly in minutes.  The ingredients include green papaya, carrots, tomatoes, fish sauce, sugar, crushed peanuts, lime juice and chilly.  Last night I also made some sushi, which would be another obsession I had two months ago.  What I like about these dishes is the flexibility and the ability to move ingredients around in a creative way, finding delicious alternatives/variations.

On a more serious and less delicious note, I also came across heavy metals the other day.  A friend, alternative health practitioner, did muscle testing on me the other day and he concluded that my entire body is under strain from mercury.  This came as a shock because I eat quite healthy and, generally speaking, care quite a bit about the environment I am in and keep my interaction with poisonous substances to a minimum.  But then it struck me, after doing more research about this subject, that I have no idea what is in anything these days, ie foods, soaps, materials, paints, etc.  We could be eating ‘healthy’ organic fish and find that this is heavily laden with mercury that strains our entire body.  This thought stressed me out and made me feel quite guilty about ‘not knowing’ and even embarrassed by my ignorance.  I know that some of my ceramic glazes or enamel paints contain lead, for example.  I use resin here and there.  And these examples are merely work materials.  What about all the other things we use, eat, drink?  I think that it is time to look at these things more closely because I love Mother Earth and I no longer want to be a contaminating agent, either for her or myself.  I even think that these kind of issues are quite fascinating for the gray area I find myself in (maybe something worthwhile?).

Have a great Sunday!

Well, it makes my mouth water … I love to eat and to try new flavors! The colors of this salad are beautiful and I was amazed how everything was well cut … To make combinations with food is an art. It seems to me that you’re good at it too!

Did you ever make edible jewelry? I like those cherry earrings, candy bracelets , pasta necklaces that we gave to our mothers. Or the Carmen Miranda’s crown made of exotic fruits… I always thought that was beautiful. I wonder a person using edible jewelry in a performance. Ephemeral and interactive …

I really enjoyed those bones. I love bones. I started making a mutant imaginary skeleton in ceramics, but I never finished. I left my vertebrae and phalanges in Brazil.

This photograph is of a bone with ornaments from the Bronze Age (some 2000 years BC…).

Maybe we are the next men of the Age of Mercury! …

And this picture was taken today, after I felt a need to empty my drawer and make a big clean . It’s phase of detachment …

It’s a kind of salad too…

Beijos!

Hi…

Nice photo of  Lisboa (beautiful how the cloud hovers above like a slumbering giant).  And I hope that your drawer salad was as good as mine!  I did quite a bit of clearing out too, nice to get rid of that old stale stagnant stuff and to make room for new things.  I almost think that I like throwing things away more than buying new stuff (and this started when I read a book my Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart, where one character only owns a total of two boxes, or very little, so moving is easy).  Now I also seem to be quite aware of garbage, waste and what it means to get new stuff and then to get rid of the old (this is part of the last post about toxic substances and so on).  I never thought about it much and I don’t know why.  But maybe the why is actually not really important here anymore because I seem to be aware of it now…

Perhaps the Age of Mercury is what we are in now, or we could call it The Golden Age of Neglect!  It makes me a bit sad and currently I am thinking about all of this to understand its core and the way it moves from its core to its end result (if the consequences ever come to a complete stop).  And this is heavy stuff, so I think I will leave this for myself alone.

Bones.  I love bones too.  Structures.  Scaffold.  Death.  I love the concept of death also (or how it is such a mysterious thing, so hidden from the world, cleared away from the public eye, sanitized, bleached, made pretty for the funeral, yet we are ALL going to experience it, no escape possible no matter what we try AND most of us are so afraid of it to the point that we never truly live).

This is a recent(ish) piece.  A skull pin with emerald eyes on an old playing card.  And to answer your question, I did make a few pieces with food, but manipulated the food in a way that it would survive its ephemeral nature.  I found that this was not an area for me!

Ciao…..:)

Hi Sebastián!

I’m too lazy to write … Here are pictures in silence…

Beijos