I'm Art Blocks Curated
Ceramics is the next release in Art Blocks’ Curated collection, I still can’t believe it’s actually happening.
Inside the computer there’s a digital hand. The hand selects a metal implement, cuts off a slab of clay, and carves into its surface. It wanders like your hand wanders; it carves imaginary contours, sinuous and exploratory. It doesn’t know the end result so it carves lines until it feels content, and then it numbers the piece and stamps its maker’s mark. It fires the slab in a digital kiln (it calls this “minting”) and through this act its art is preserved for millennia. The hand runs its fingers over the textured surface, feeling satisfaction at having spontaneously produced a piece of art so beautiful, expressive, and unique.
I started working on Ceramics in November 2021, and when I was struck down with COVID in January last year I wasn’t sure I’d ever finish it. I used to love making art with my hands (life drawing, painting, jewellery, any material I could get my hands on tbh) but since I got sick I haven’t been able to do any of that. Ceramics started as a technical challenge to see whether I could make realistic clay-like material in the browser, but it became my only outlet to feel tactile artistic satisfaction, even if only through a screen.
I could go on and on about the parallels between clay and the blockchain as materials to critically justify this as a series of art pieces, but what I want fundamentally is for people to see them and be touched by their beauty, wish they could run their fingers over them, and hopefully spark a bit of wonder.
The drop is on Wednesday, March 15th at 6pm GMT (12pm CST); I do hope you’ll share this project and pick one up yourself.
I’m also going to be continuing to write up all the technical details of this project as weekly blog posts, my third post on how to make realistic ceramic materials with three.js will be up in the next couple of days.
This is very scary! And very exciting!
I found out this week that my appeal for income protection insurance has been denied so I currently have no income. It would be very comforting if this is successful, hopefully I can eek out a living by selling the occasional art project at the pace my long COVID symptoms dictate.
In other little news I updated the colour schemes on my website using Primer Prism which is an incredible tool — it makes it so easy to design colour scales and check each step’s contrast compared to the rest.
Also, I'm really enjoying being on Mastodon and on Twitter. Mastodon feels looser, and since I copied over my follow lists from Twitter a lot of my Mastodon connections are people I know from web development land. I like the idea of my Twitter being mainly a gen art space and Mastodon being where I can geek out about CSS.
Many happy returns,
Charlotte ✨