Cartoon Couple — Clay-Look Sculpture, Pottery Studio, Lisbon

They have thrown pots together in the same studio for thirty years. The studio’s members commissioned the piece for their retirement, and the brief contained one line that decided everything: they want it to look like it has just been made.

Working from clay, not towards it

We sculpted the maquette in real clay at 280 mm, by hand, with no smoothing tools. Then, before it dried, the two of them were asked to handle it — which they did, reluctantly, and left a set of thumb and finger marks across the shoulders and back.

The enlarged sculpture is a casting of that maquette. At 1.9 m the marks are roughly seven times life size, and the effect is that a thumbprint reads as a broad shallow valley running across the shoulder. It gives the eye something to follow and it is the entire reason the surface reads as hand-worked.

Posture over likeness

Neither of them wanted to be recognisable. What they wanted was to be recognisable as potters. So the likeness was dropped and the posture kept: both figures stoop slightly forward from the shoulders, both have short forearms and wide hands, and their heads sit a little low in the shoulders. Tired, capable, standing very close.

Colour

Five muted earth tones, brushed on rather than sprayed so the paint pools in the deeper marks exactly as it would on raw clay, then sealed dead matte. There is no gloss anywhere on the piece, and the studio was very clear about that: glazed ceramics in their courtyard would have been a joke at their expense. They work in earthenware.

In the courtyard

It stands beside the studio door, where apprentices pass it on the way in. The studio has a rule that nobody may smooth or clean the marks, and they have hung a small handwritten sign saying so in three languages.