SAIIER 2020:White Peacock clay studio
Entity::White Peacock clay studio
The project is ongoing since 2008. It’s a place where everybody can explore one’s creativity with clay – a most obedient and yet demanding material. We conduct classes, workshops, participate at the larger events and exhibitions. With the students we undertake community projects. People of ages 3 to 100 years come to explore ceramics with us.
Two ceramic artists – Anna and Saraswati – initiated this venture, and later Fedor joined them as a technical part of the team. Initially ‘White Peacock’ opened in an old tiny building in the corner of Kindergarten compound (kindly offered to us by the Kindergarten team); a few years later, in 2015, our new building opened in the same area.
Activities of the year:
Since 2008 ‘White Peacock’ exists in the same format: regular classes for different age groups (preschoolers, school children, adults), classes within school/kindergarten curriculum, events, workshops, and exhibitions of students’ works.
Our technological cycle is fully professional (suitable mostly for decorative ceramics); we have two electric kilns to maintain two firings for the pieces – buisk and glaze firing.
We have the potential to grow, but even at this point the studio is able to provide any person with all the needful to understands the basics of ceramics and to have a great fun with it.
This year we had quite a few challenges and achievements:
- 1) We had an exceptionally bright Open-Air Exhibition of all the students’ works at our premises in January. As per our tradition, the exhibition was accompanied with clay related activities for all ages and a pancake feast. Children-students took duties in guiding the guests, assisting with the activities, and making pancakes as well as supervising the exhibition.
- 2) Anna got an opportunity to decorate a new upcoming building at Udavi School with colorful ceramic elements. It was a great chance for our teachers’ team to focus on this task while all the classes were stopped due to pandemic. This project is ongoing.
- 3) This year for the first time we collaborated with the Petite Maison international residency program. We had three participants – one in September 2019, another team of two artists in February 2020 – who worked at White Peacock studio on a co-working base and completed their projects in two weeks’ time. We enjoyed this collaboration as it was mutually beneficial for the guest artists and for students. In future we hope to involve visiting artists in our curriculum.
- 4) We involved two volunteers willing to assist with the Saturday and Sunday classes which are usually most crowded. Angelica (then Newcomer, now Aurovilian) and Clara (Savi volunteer) reinforced our team for some time. Now with the pandemic situation and the country boarder closure we need to wait until some energetic people with ceramic experience will knock at our door.
- 5) At the beginning of the lockdown when classes were interrupted, we organized two weeks' online drawing challenge for studio participants with more than 30 people involved. Most of the students and parents managed all the 14 tasks (one theme and one drawing a day), developed their life drawing skills, had lots of fun, trained their eye to see the beauty in each detail, and even received clay-made medals marking their improvement. At the end of the challenge our collective participated at Helena-Uma’s initiative of greeting the volunteers involved in COVID-19 service with cake and a handmade card. Young students of White Peacock studio made 50 vibrant cards for this venture.
- 6) One of our team members, Saraswati, was selected for participation in the prestigious Art residency in Taipei Ceramic Museum (Taiwan). Unfortunately, the pandemic did not allow this to happen. The residency was postponed to 2021.
In February 2020 Saraswati’s works were selected for participation at Bhopal International Symposium/exhibition. Altogether she participated in fifteen exhibitions in India and abroad in the 2019-20 school year.
- 7) Another facilitator, Anna, participated with her own creations (about 50 pieces made of porcelain) in an exhibition at Savitri Bhavan dedicated to The Mother’s Birthday and the meanings The Mother gave to the flowers.
We as a team believe that it’s very important for the teaching artists to continue to grow and to deepen the skills and the understanding of the material as well as the contemporary development of art medium. If one’s potential grows, one always has something to share with the others.
The new direction in our work is community projects. Children (some of them attending White Peacock classes for some years) and adult students can make a good quality ceramic mural all together. We hope to undertake more projects where the community becomes the beneficiary. Making something real, useful for the others builds a collective and gives a good motivation for growth.
Outcomes:
We mainly focus on the amateurs’ development and children's after-school activities, as we believe this is the most needed for Auroville community trying to follow a concept of unending education and eternal youth.
Out of many other creative mediums ceramics is the least likely to be tried at home on one’s own as it requires heavy equipment and specific technological knowledge. However, in the digital era physical arts such as ceramics become crucial and gain popularity as digital detox options for kids and adults. Firstly ceramics reconnects one with the Earth energy; secondly it requires full concentration and presence in the moment with all your senses, restoring the brain-hands coordination. Another thing is that it exists in real time, one step at a time, you can’t skip a step or speed up the process. And it’s just an interesting process.
This year the number of participants and classes grew, and we expect the same trend to continue next year.
Conclusion:
We had a very intense year. The number of our students grew up as well as the number of classes. The popularity of clay related activities is growing and we have to look for options to catch up with the demand. Most certainly, we need to involve more volunteer-facilitators in our team once the situation allows and people/tourists start coming again to Auroville.
Unfortunately, during the last two months of the school year and all the summer holidays we could not offer any live classes at all as gatherings were prohibited due to pandemic measures.
Meanwhile we focused on our own skill development and took part in a mural decoration of the new primary level school building at Udavi School.
