I am a tactile person and I think more in images than words, which is why I have to mull over everything and sit with things I want to say before expressing them verbally. I often find myself reaching out to touch things to see what they feel like. On walks I run my hands over bushes and pull leaves through my fingers. The habit has gotten me in trouble on a few occasions when I have trapped an unsuspecting bee between my fingers and have been stung.
The hands on nature of working with clay is what drew me to ceramics and hand building in particular (I’ve never been really good at centering clay. That and the fact that I really liked making mud pies as a kid. With many other mediums there is a distance between you and what your creating with. With painting there is the brush, with drawing there is the pencil and with photography your are looking through the camera. While I like working with those mediums (finger painting!), I prefer to get my hands dirty.
Tactile love doesn’t end with the making of the object. I love making work that is textured and the feeling of the object is just as important as the look of it. I add as much texture as possible, I impress antique lace into wet clay, I use hand made stamps on pieces of clay and add them on top of the lace making items that look like fantastical, topographical maps.
Lil Bee Writes 