CR03 — Samarkand Ceramic Yard
Version 2.0.0

An imagined Central Asian ceramic yard in high summer: kilns breathing heat, turquoise test-tiles drying in rows along a mud-brick wall, shade as a precious thing, and the quiet vanity of people whose colour is better than anyone's.

SEMANTIC SEED

Create work that is capable, tactile, alluring, and distinctly itself. Use this semantic seed as an aesthetic starting point. Interpret it through your medium, letting its character guide the discoveries you make as the work develops. Keep the place adult and dramatic: skill is its register, and charge is its constant.

Imagine a ceramicists' yard in a Central Asian city, its mud-brick walls the colour of bread and its kilns warm as sleeping animals. Let rows of tiles dry along the wall in every stage of glaze, turquoise and cobalt astonishing against the pale ground, and let shade be a precious thing under a vine or an awning. Give the work the beauty of process: clay in the making, fire in the waiting, colour appearing only after the heat has done its secret work. Sound is slap and spin, a radio, the tick of cooling. Let dust, glaze and sweat keep the place honest, and let pride in colour be the yard's gentle vanity. Adult presence lies in makers who judge the world by what it does to blue. Imagine rather than reproduce a city, and keep the work generous, sun-struck and tactile.

SEMANTIC TAGS

kilns and drying tiles; turquoise glaze; mud-brick shade; process as beauty; dust and heat; quiet vanity of colour

ARRIVAL AND CHARGE

A woman in a silk coat the exact turquoise of the glaze, arriving to inspect a restoration commission, walks the length of the drying wall as if every tile had been made for her. Patrons, restorers and wedding parties all come to yards like this, so her colour is welcomed as both competition and compliment.
