TPWTECC

Full title: "The Proper Way to Eat Colored Candy"

After finishing this series: ,
I was a little exhausted from the seriousness of it. So I decided that my second piece would be more playful. The other motive behind this work was in my attempt to reconcile the difference between my ceramic works and my regular style of work.

Outside of ceramics, I tend to work in a very systematic, analytical way. But when you put clay in my hands, I tend to think less, and feel more. So while they may still sort of look like a work that I'd make, conceptually, they produce a little dissonance, since they're more personal and less analytical.

So I started thinking about myself and how that relates to the works that I do. I started to think about systems and structures in my life, and decided to make a piece about one of the most prevalent systems in my life, how I eat colored candies.

Now, I won't go into the specifics of what that system is, but it's a bit OCD. However, I've found that a lot of other people have similar methods to eating candies and foods like this. One of these is my mother. We recently discovered the other ate candies in the exact same way we did, suggesting that this whole thing is a learned behavior. Nature v. nurture over a box of gumdrops.

As with my other work, a large amount of energy was spent focussing on the presentation, and I'm very proud of the cabinet that I made for all these individual pieces. There are so few cracks between the walls of the cubbies.
For the work, I bought a package of M&M's, then made a slip-cast "M" for every candy in the pack, glazed with low-fire industrial glazes to match the color and resemble the finish. Then I organized them in my cabinet of 55 cubbies, in the order I would eat them. I like the pattern it produces, as well as the fact that in a sense, this work is about my mom like the DMS2 is about my dad.

This thing weighs a ton.