n.i.p.s. report

There's this client... he is a sweet, shy, Japanese kid who barely speaks english and bows to me constantly & if I sit on a chair he'll sit on the floor because he says his head can't be above mine. He's one of the clients I see every few weeks one-on-one for an hour or so. Anyway, this week he showed me a box of ceramic bananas that he'd made, around maybe 20 of them, fired with different glazes, some collaged with newspaper. There were a few that looked just like a turd and for some reason it made me very happy to see these things I had never seen before, a new category of object, turd-bananas. I don't think he meant to make them look so poo-like; he just wanted to make them appear rotty and decomposed, and in fact he seemed to be unaware of the resemblance, but really, I mean just look at them!



Also partly I was happy because the last time I'd met with him we had talked for an hour about another ceramic piece he'd made that was essentially a planter, and I had to dig very deep down to come up with stuff to say about interiority vs. exteriority, nature and culture, minimalism and earthworks, yadda-yadda. By comparison it was really easy to talk about those bananas.