I work with clay but try to work wonders. I create something new while preserving the old. Clay is a miraculous material – it is but a piece of dirt from the ground but your hands and your heart can work wonders with it. You work to make something out of it, but you are really working with it. With it, since your work will only amount to something if clay lets you, and it will only let you if you approach it with respect. If you do, you can, however, work wonders.
In today’s world, folk art and traditions are increasingly in vogue. This makes me smile and cry at the same. I am happy to see ever more people using the same objects and instruments that our forefathers used in their everyday lives – it is just that the souls of these objects often seem to have been lost over time. I think we are parts to a process and if this process unfolds as it is meant to unfold, the lost soul will return to once more inhabit the objects in our daily lives – that is if people use them and the heritage they receive with genuine care and love. The organic and pure, noble material is what shows us how to use them properly.
I am a guardian of the old, I preserve our heritage, together with those who help sustain a tradition inherited from old masters who shaped it with their everyday work and struggle. We accept the limitations of the materials we work with, we use them as they were “meant” to be used, uncover what hides in them. Michelangelo is said to have held that every rock hides a statue that you need to liberate. I try to liberate the dishes from the clay and infuse into them a soul of their own. As I do this, I myself set out on a new life, since the materials I work with reinvigorates my soul, as well. I feel calm and filled with love in making an object, as I know what it carries within itself and hope that it will make somebody’s life more enjoyable, more complete.
Andrea Barcsay
