3 - Petrus Spronk

The Art 

“ZEN SILENCE – of the forest snow”

 “ZEN SILENCE – of the forest snow” by Petrus Spronk  
(height 105 mm, width 145 mm) , Cat 21, (sold) 
Series: ‘The magic of the Forest’,  
Ptetrus’s website: petrusspronk.com

Dutch born artist Petrus Spronk is based in Daylesford, South Eastern Australia and describes himself as “a creative spirit travelling along the ceramic path”. I have known Petrus as a ceramicist, sculptor, writer and an avid supporter of community arts and have had the privilege of working with Petrus several times, performing (live) sound-paintings in response to his writings and selected art works.

Petrus’ comments 

“The bowl is not glazed, but burnished. I learned the art of burnishing from the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico. Burnishing means polishing the clay by rubbing it with a very smooth stone before the bowl is fired, to make the clay, to some extent, non-porous. 

The surface of this bowl was manipulated/adorned with a brush filled with smoke and flames, that, plus a little magic. I did not create the bowl as a container, but rather as an object of contemplation, with the important aspect of the bowl: the empty space inside.I hope it will bring some quietness, stillness and meditativeness into the space it is viewed.

With this work it is the firing process in the wood-fired kiln 
where the emphasis lies. 
The enriching of a surface imbued with flame and smoke markings 
Extracting from the kiln its visual magic. 
Enhancing the work with Kiln mysteries 
Painting the surface of the bowl with a brush loaded with fire and smoke, creating images of the forest in its primal form. Returning to the source. 
Something raw with something refined. And there lies the necessary tension in the work. The tension which gets the attention”

The Music 

Helen's comments

I was thinking about earth through to stone; about stones we can move, those we can’t move and the earth’n’stone we have to work to move; I imagined soft clay and friable soils, water softened pebbles, glaciated mountain ridges, fault and fold lines in cliff faces, monoliths and sand grains, course bedrock and the compounds, gems, metals and precious stones therein.   

I wanted to give a sense of now-ness, random and orderliness; fullness and emptiness, here and there-ness; the space to contemplate these things and how we do or don’t relate to allness and oneness (all in three minutes or less…but I needed more time, hence almost 10 mins of music).   

In allocating a different pulse to each piano track (10, 6, 8 and one with random pulse) I was aiming for a definite structure that I couldn’t predict other than knowing it would act as a container of meter.   By maintaining a commitment to this basic structure, I played each track without a specific harmonic progression in mind, allowing the music to form it’s own intersections of sound (chords).  

The E-bow is here to add to the sense of spaciousness. No audio effects have been added to the raw recordings. It is as it is. Rather than creating a canonic/circular piece, I wanted to have a start and finish point to the music with a middle section that evolved in it’s own way, thus giving the spaciousness and “zwischenraum” as a place of contemplation.  That’s what I’d like to give here, hoping it is complimentary to Petrus’ beautiful, earthen bowl.