Inspiration
Thirty spokes share the hub of a wheel; yet it is its centre that makes it useful. You can mould clay into a vessel; yet, it is its emptiness that makes it useful. Cut doors and windows from the walls of a house; but the ultimate use of the house will depend on that part where nothing exists. Therefore, something is shaped into what is; but its usefulness comes from what is not.
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
50 cm high, 12 cm diameter
The design of this artwork evolved during my studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, when we were commissioned to design a vase for just one flower.
I chose a poem by Lao Tzu from the famous book Tao Te Ching, which fitted my design perfectly. The book Tao Te Ching is among my great favourites.
The vase was made out of pure and white porcelain clay on the potter’s wheel. When the hand-thrown vase was leather hard, I one by one cut the letters of the poem out of the still flexible porcelain clay. Even though the porcelain vase is perforated by the cut-out letters, the vase can still be filled with water and flowers once it is finished. The reason is that inside the vase there is a second vase made of mouth-blown glass, which the assistant of the glass department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie made especially for this artwork at that time, in exchange for a series of hand-thrown cups.
I can still remember how I cut all those letters out of the leather hard porcelain clay in hours of manual labour. When I had finally finished, I made the mistake of letting the vase dry on my worktable. When transporting it to the kiln in its dry state and fragile as it was, the vase completely collapsed at the slightest touch.
At the second attempt it worked better, because I transported the vase to the kiln in its still leather-hard state directly after cutting out the letters, and let it dry slowly within the oven, followed by the firing process about two weeks later.
If you are interested in this design, I can make a similar and personalized model for you, and you can choose the poem yourself as well as the size of the vase. In the meantime, I have collected a whole series of slender glass vases in various sizes to use as inner vessels. There is even a mouth-blown vase included which you may choose.