Gold and Metamorphosis
This post comes back to another sculpture I’ve been working on, inspired by folio f82r of the Voynich Manuscript. (Part 1 here.) This part is hand-sculpted porcelain, meant to capture the likeness of one of the “nymphs” while at the same time resembling a butterfly chrysalis. I wanted her to look as though she is sleeping, possibly embodying a butterfly’s transformation in the stage before the chrysalis breaks open to “awaken” into a butterfly.
This is the glazed porcelain, after it has been fired. (I can tell that the kiln “overfired” a bit, meaning that it got even hotter than it was supposed to, and this is why the white part of the porcelain looks a bit more glassy and shiny than usual, and why the green glaze ended up becoming a bit darker than usual.) At this stage, I wanted to add gold luster, which requires an additional firing, to a comparatively lower temperature. The gold luster looks red before firing (third photo).
After firing the gold luster:
Before transforming into an orange-and-black winged butterfly, a monarch caterpillar becomes a green chrysalis. On the surface of the chrysalis, small gold dots form. Though they are not actually metallic, they reflect the light in such a way that they appear like real gold. Curiously, no one seems to know exactly why this happens.
According to: https://monarchjointventure.org/faq/chrysalis-gold-dots there are multiple hypotheses:
1. Camouflage -- they could reflect colors of the surroundings and break up the shape of the pupa; they might also look like dew droplets.
2. Warning coloration
3. Filtering particular wavelengths of light which might be harmful to the monarchs
4. They might not have any function but just be the result of something else in the cuticle of the insect.
5. Oxygen exchange
When designing this sculpture, I wanted to include these gold dots, painted with gold luster.
The gold is also a running theme throughout most of the sculptures in my Voynich series. I see it as alluding to multiple different types of symbolism: one aspect of this could be the search for meaning in the Voynich Manuscript, and the idea that there may be something of value there, or even that the process itself of attempting to find this meaning could be of value.
Another reason that it feels appropriate to combine gold with porcelain comes from the history of porcelain itself: the discovery of the recipe for European porcelain was actually the result of an alchemist’s quest to create gold. This ended up instead producing porcelain, which was valued just as highly, and the process of its creation was a highly guarded secret. It was over the course of nearly a decade of imprisonment by a king, that the young alchemist, Johann Frederick Böttger, managed to create the right formulas—and he was certainly motivated since his life depended on it! Any porcelain artist today is indebted to these trials and efforts. And for these sculptures, using a material whose composition itself was once regarded as mysterious and magical, I want to transform it into sculptural forms that aim to embody some themes of mystery in their own way.
I am planning to try some new techniques with glassworking that involve metal/wire combined with glass, and also to experiment with how the porcelain sculpture could be enclosed inside a glass form and made to glow with light or be surrounded by “lightning”…
Temporarily hanging from my lamp, the sleeping nymph awaits some forthcoming plasma experiments…
