Saly Noémi (szerk.): Gorka Lívia keramikusművész (Budapest, 2010)
Kollin András: Bibliográfia
. 1 I had to assemble all the many shades of black powders and oxides as well. Only materials obtained directly from the mines retained their secret quality after grains had broken down in the fire. After a time, the textbooks did not help any more. 1 only had a sense of moderation and proportion to rely on. I had long since replaced the potter’s wheel in my work with piling or spreading and stretching the material by hand. Instead of applying the law of the wheel, my hands wrestled or came to terms with the clay. The work was hard, but never violent - a combination of physical and mental labour, and that was the essence of the matter. It became a way of life, a passion. 1 could occupy myself with nothing else but the chemistry of heat. 1 never wanted to imitate nature, because any comment on scenes or sounds is still only a piece of writing. Everything „of which an example exists" is an example itself, to paraphrase Wittgenstein. The differences found within a set of states, the memories of accumulated experimentation and the total absorption in the subject being worked on gave me an opportunity to express through a tiny, finite movement the experience and knowledge I had fed into myself. From the soft smoothness or hand-rasping coarseness of the clay came a succession of new ideas. It was particularly exciting that this all appeared as shades of grey in the unfired state. I had to know from experience how the objects would become their own decoration when they were fired with raw glazes and their colours and shades perspired. For the proportions of the granulated material decided whether the object, from its surface to its centre, would condense into organic, granular stoneware. The term stoneware has long been used, referring to its hardness and its raw material. The newly fashionable French gres is known in Hungarian as grainy stoneware, the grains being finely ground firing clay, and so it should not be referred to as stoneware, which denotes something different. My debates with my father in childhood about what is divisible and what is indivisible have been resolved. Ceramics are the hardening of a simple movement by fire. The secrets were not revealed easily. They enslaved me. Fire was the key. At temperatures approaching white heat, there is nothing uncertain, debatable or excited any more. The inseparability is quite clear. I could never see the point of those debates in which distinctions were fabricated between arts and crafts, the silicate industry and artists. These cohere and complement each other. The axes of space and time belong here as well. On the great horizontal line of space lies the vast realm of mineral and stone, this earth of ours, our stock of raw materials. On the horizontal axis of time appear the clay soldiers of China, the secretive, artful Tang Ying of the early 18th century, [ohann Friedrich Böttger, who battled to rediscover porcelain, the museums which exist to preserve things of value, Seger, who set the temperature, and the designers of today. The axes of space and time rub against each other, as they have to in order to know and recognize each other and themselves. Only a thinker can attempt to make the cold, stern, inorganic world an organic one of connections, through understanding of nature, respect and perseverance. Man and his humanism - only in this way can artifice become art. In 1987, the endless windows of the Vigadó Gallery in Budapest, overlooking the Danube and infinity, gave me an opportunity to mount a final exhibition. The self-contained entity of the round harmonic forms, becoming wings, freed me from the recurring dream of „current-bearing wires". 32
