Zana Milne | Studio and Process

With each form, I begin with a spiral...

The first thing I saw of my newborn baby was the top of his head painted by a dark spiral, crowned by the whorl of nature's thumbprint.

My Process

It's form is the language of the Celts for the path of life, death and rebirth, and in many religions for a spiritual path towards divinity, of enlightenment.

It represents the idea of "the eternal return' to Carl Jung, of coming back over where you have been before but never exactly the same, you are above or below, finding a different perspective always.

To Goethe the associations are to archetypal polarities, like male/female, life/death and a type of motion within opposing force fields that intensifies and suspends them, and so it is about overstepping boundaries and resisting closure and stasis.

It lives in so many natural forms, the snail's shell, a pine cone, the order leaves grow to accommodate each other's best interests to stretch towards the light.

From a spiral, a coil grows.

Coiling is a technique that entails the intimacy of repeated handling without machinery, like the potters wheel, so that nothing comes between the maker and the made

Stillness of baked earth.

The objects I am led to make come from a drive to express a kind of primitive natural archetype, for the vulnerability of solo growth in relationship to the connective world around. I am curious about how energetic dynamics might be expressed through the stillness of baked earth.

I use no glaze, the pieces are of naked clay. Earth in essence. They are almost always wood fired after their initial bisque firing, and then polished with beeswax to bring back the burnished gleam.

Once upon a time...

Back in my own beginning, drawing was my number two solace, my number one being the natural world of Earth. I would lose herself for hours drawing animals mostly.

People said she would be an artist. Life went on. I found myself being asked again and again to do illustrations for others until she thought she should go get proper training in illustration, but as early as the foundation course in art, I fell in love with sculpture. It was as if I remembered who I am.

So, as a single parent to two young boys, I undertook a sculpture degree. However, while good on so many levels, the degree was often of the stuff of found art, film and video and manifestos of explanations and so instead, I found herself lugging bags of clay onto my kitchen table, to follow an urge to parr back and discover something essential and alive.

It is like a hunt towards an intrinsic dynamic. I love Constantin Brancusi and Anish Kapoor for this in their work. It is a spiral away from the precise and representative drawings of her childhood and early adulthood, and consequently feels like a process of her own becoming.

Of becoming aware of your true self, so relinquishing your old scriptort colf to live to be, as opposed to what you think you should be. Which is like my ceramic objects. While I may hold an intention for their shaping, I invite and enjoy how they are experienced and interpreted by others.