Saly Noémi (szerk.): Gorka Lívia keramikusművész (Budapest, 2010)

Kollin András: Bibliográfia

destiny was a repetition. „This is as far as I got, you go further!" was how my father sent me on my way.

No words could express the importance of being left alone, or the memory of losing those childhood arguments. I was faced with the chance and the need to prove myself. Was 1 capable of creating a real individual out of myself? 1 saw the yardstick and the goal, which seemed unattainable, but I was not expecting the road to be strewn with hightension electric trip-wires instead of bumps.

When I left Verőce in 1960 with my husband and son, 1 lost more or less all of our mutual friends. They took me for a thankless child for abandoning my parental home. What I took with me was not a book of recipes, but something much more: a playful childhood full of ideas - from whose tiny pieces of acquired learning I had to forge a coherent body of knowledge - a love of reading, a curiosity, and an expectation.

The independence gave me enormous energy. I served on juries. I made a translation of a textbook that was not supposed to be available to me. I knew what my job was. I had to obtain raw material, and first of all, an electric kiln. 1 no longer cared that 1 had to go to the Ministry of Culture for a permit to order foreign literature, or to the Arts Foundation for a materials allocation, or to the Artists' Association for a rubber stamp before I travelled to Finland, Italy or France. 1 had to make a scheme of my own within this great divided, roundabout bureaucracy. I got used to making longer or shorter trips: to dangerous, abandoned caves and quarries at home, to excavations on the Greek island of Santorini at Nea Kaimeni, where the lava had solidified into vast blocks, and to the rim of Mount Vesuvius, steaming yellow. Memories returned of risky childhood exploits of swimming across the Danube and underwater excursions. There was no problem with the seeming dichotomy between continuous work and accuracy of experiment, because the two ends of Ariadne’s thread were tied together.

Then I looked up Salmenhaara in Helsinki. He was the one I spoke to first about high temperatures and the connection between clay and glaze, and the shades of difference in and between them. I saw clearly that it was essential for theory and practice to move in parallel. I embarked on a never-ending process of experimentation, a time of moving forward. I no longer remember how and why I dared to fire iron with the clay, because their behaviour in the fire is absolutely different. I devised a method of working that was unprecedented and which I had not learnt, with nothing else to support it except my own mentality. I was highly honoured when in 1963 1 was selected for these works by the curator of the Modern Museum in Linz as the only potter in an exhibition of contemporary artists in Austria. My first individual exhibition took place at the Csók Gallery in Budapest in 1964. „It certainly will not leave the public or those with a knowledge of art unaffected”, Géza Perneczky predicted in a review, and it didn't.

Once I had made my decision, it took me only half an hour to put an end to my ties with Artex, to „mass production", because it had only been a means to an end. After that I had to do everything for myself. For instance, someone from the shipping company turned up at Gül Baba utca, the steep street where I lived, and told me to have the wall of the house demolished, right up to the joist, by ten o’clock the next morning. That was how they managed to gingerly manoeuvre in the gas kiln sent from Switzerland, which I needed for my future work. I said farewell to the electric kiln in which I had completed so many experiments.

In spite of its four safety devices, the gas kiln called for discipline. For one thing there was the fearsome roar of its tall, bare flames, separated from the workshop only by a flimsy door that could be opened with two fingers. I must admit, this leap to a different technical level has left me dizzy. 1 already had the materials I needed for that working temperature. There could still be no question of a clay mixture made up by someone else. I worked with coloured materials, stirring the firing clay into the mixture myself in various grain sizes and colours. (The firing clay is only an additive. Without a binding material, clay, its grains would never stick together, so it would be impossible to model or build with it, or at least make anything more than a sand-castle.)

The raw materials for the clay paste were going to waste in the factory stores, but you needed a permit to obtain them. There was smooth Norwegian feldspar, sparkling German quartz, Czech china clay, loose, snow-white and heavy, coagulating granulates, and crystalline granules. I never imagined there could be so many shades of white.

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