Julie Lluch

Born on March 5, 1946 in Iligan City, Philippines. She completed a degree in Philosophy at the University
of Sto. Tomas in 1967 . She held her first one-woman show at Sining Kamalig in 1977. Others followed in
venues like Galerie Bleue, the Cultural Center of the Philippines, the Metropolitan Museum of Manila
and Liongoren Art Gallery. Her 1997 show Art and Faith was held at Galleria Duemila.

She has also joined international group exhibits in Fukuoka, Brisbane, Tokyo, Jakarta and Bangkok.

In 1997 Lluch won the Araw ng Maynila award for Sculpture. She has also won awards for her work as a
set designer and as an experimental filmmaker. She produced and acted in the prize-winning short film
Yuta, Earth Art of Julie Lluch Dalena.

Lluchs public sculpture commissions include statues of Ninoy Aquino and Arsenio Lacson along Roxas
Boulevard.

Notes on a Potter's Life

by Julie Lluch

I tend to idealize the potters life its closeness to nature, its romance with earth, water, wind and fire,
its simplicity. I am endlessly impressed with the story from the bible of how God fashioned man out of
clay and blew into it the breath of life. What vivid imagery! How apt the metaphor! I see the potter
meditatively bent over the turning wheel out of which rises a vessel of clay. That, I tell myself, is how I
shall spend the days of my old age, turning out magical pots in some quiet retreat near the mountain, or
beside the sea.

I recall watching the great Japanese film Ugetsu about a simple potter caught in the cross currents of
love, ambition and war. It used the ancient oriental Art of Pottery as a symbol of human spirit, attested
to by the fragments and shards ubiquitously present in the background of all civilizations, races and
histories.

I have secretly wished to be a potter and would have become one, if I hadnt known I didnt posses the
qualities and temperament it takes to be one.

I have often asked: what is it that makes a potter go on making pots over and over again day after day?
Is he not happy with his pots or is he still looking for the perfect one? His apprenticeship is long and his
subject inexhaustible.

I liken the potter, quite romantically, to the primitive brujos of Carlos Castanedas landscape, whose
secret knowledge of nature is the source of their powers. The potmaker of old is an accomplice of
nature. In making a pot, he waits for the right season, the correct time of the day, chooses the exact
spot on the earth, the elevation, the aridity, humidity. He checks the turn of the wind, the color of fire
and after attending to a hundred other preparations, waits and prays for the unseen powers to favor the
work of his alchemy.
I look on pottery as pure art. Here the artist serves as instrument of the material and not the other way
round. The simpler the pot, the better it is. If it pretends to be other or more than a pot, the less perfect
it becomes. It is pure in the sense that it is free from the intrusions of the makers person, who, as in the
case of less pure arts, seeks to impose his mind on his material to get across a message or idea, a story
or stylewhatever it isthe self. A true potter sets aside ego and personality to achieve a good pot.
This for me is true discipline, true humility.

Pottery, I decided, is not only unnatural but also impossible in the city. A monk can best pray in his
monastery cell or a landscape painter can best paint in the great outdoors.

Most potters I know have settled in the countryside where they may be closer to their sources and
elements, and work in peace beside a mountain or the sea. I, too, have tried to break away from the
city, time and again, but I have eventually learned to move with the brisk beat of city life and to be
energized by the richness of complexity, the texture and color of urban culture. I have become
reluctantly urbanite (a city mouse if you like) continually enticed by technological novelties but wary of
the efficiency and sophistication of metropolitan living.

I would be a potter in the wrong environment and would produce a different kind of pottery.
Nevertheless, I would still speak the old language of clay.

In the world of art there exist certain set values and reactions that have nothing to do with reason. Clay
aspiring to be art is considered cute. Clay has always been regarded as traditional; it is provincial,
vocational, substandard, backward; it is nature, artifact, craft, folk; it is palayok. At best, it is ceramics.
But it is NOT Art.

I found the allusions amusing and I began to realize, as I went on working, that clay sculpture/pottery,
sculpture/ceramic art---whatever it is named, is a new and exciting thing as far as Philippine art is
concerned and its possibilities lay waiting to be explored.

Moreover, I discovered that clay could deliver well in the high streets. It doesnt have the sleek-smooth
efficiency of bronze, but bronzes all tend to look alike and woods all seem to have the same finish. Clay
has a charming quality, sometimes both endearingly nave and sophisticated. Remarkably versatile and
tractable, it can be witty, kitsch or even erotic. Speak a very personal language, from slang to classic.

From its origins, this subculture, sub-artistic medium carries with it the natural grain of protest and has
evolved into a wonderful vehicle to pounce upon high-art and its agents of repression.

On occasions, I find myself arguing and defending lowly clay against the nobler and harder marble and
bronze. And I need never fear it would run out on me because even as oil and acrylic get scarcer and
dearer by the day, all the earth is covered with clay. Such is my confidence in this medium which has
become to me a good weapon and companion, an alter ego thru the years.

I love to think of clay as the most apt poetic metaphor for artistic creation. It is a very sensual medium
soft, obedient and pleasurable to the touch. The artist is in most immediate contact with it, working
directly with his hands and body. There are no intermediary tools.
I derive almost childlike delight working in this medium, remembering the time in childhood when
playing with dirt and mud was such a grievous misdeed. Clay is a natural plaything and touching it
revives old instincts. The thing is to let them out as fast as I can, as spontaneously and as joyfully.

I worked with children for a time, teaching forming methods like pinching, slab-making, coiling and free-
hand sculpting. It is the youngsters who enjoy themselves most, playing lustily while giving the
impression of seriously working and being so proud afterwards with their finished works. Play, work and
art. How happily they go together.

Portraits

My early works were nudes and busts in terra cotta, mostly of members of my family, poets, artists and
friends. Clay lends itself sensitively to portraiture, receiving the slightest pressure of hands, registering
the finest lines. Even my

finger marks are visible all over the work.

I used a buff-colored groggy clay-mixture fired low, sanded and smooth, painted or tinted and then
waxed shiny. I was pleased with its flesh-like texture and tone, the grogg showing on the surface like tiny
pores on the human skin.

After a while, I grew uneasy and defensive about doing busts, a feeling I would eventually and quickly
get over with it. Portraiture had long lost artistic esteem. It is pass and commercial and besides, what
can it have to say about social conditions and current issues? But portraits will always be around and the
artists repertoire will not be complete without them.

For a time the idea of people took hold of me-grouped figures, multitudes, masses, droves of human
bodies moving together. This was the time of unrest and Great (First) Quarter Storm when the artists
marched down the streets shouting slogans, students and communists burned effigies and stormed
government buildings. This was also the time my husband painted his Jai-Alai series of numberless,
faceless people queuing up ticket counters, mobs and city characters filling up rows of fronton galleries
betting their last money and their souls in the game. Those were troubled times and, personally, also a
stressful period. I did ceramic sculptures of students demonstrating, a religious procession of the Black
Nazarene, a winding stream of migrants leading to nowhere. My husbands influence on my work was
clearly evident and inevitable. It was a good influence, too, during my formative years.

In the later part of the 70s I witnessed the phenomenal development of Philippine art. The number of
artists multiplied by the hundreds, galleries sprung up and there were exhibitions every week. Every
kind of western and oriental idea was tried out, no ism was spared. I heard artists speak of relevance,
social consciousness and commitment. The local art scene became a chop suey of sorts, not really a bad
thing for Philippine art.

As my own awareness expanded, I sought an angle from which to view the world. I didnt know much
about life in general nor the world at large. I sought only to deal with things I knew best and which were
closest to my heart.

Subsequently, I found my self working from the feminine viewpoint, creating sculptures with a rather
tacky sexist character. There were a lot of women in my work, like the biblical Susanna Bathing, as
fierce animals stalk and lustful elders watch from behind the rocks and bushes.
In my later works, I reduced conceptual elements in order to go back to the medium. One thing about
clay: it is so receptive, one easily indulges ones self in indiscriminate expression. This tendency I tried to
control. In my new works I found clay again as my personal medium, exploring its sensuous character
purely on the level of feeling or sensation.

These works are more abstract and concentrate on simple forms that draw attention to tactile qualities.
For the first time I used glazes, disproving my own previous misconception about glazes being
incompatible with sculptural works.

Perhaps what Im doing now is to go back to potter. I enjoy doing simple forms, repeating them
endlessly, I turn out phallic-like cacti forms, rocks and numerous heart-shapes.

I believe in working to exhaustion and satiety. When something takes hold of me, I work it out to the
point of boredom. The stronger the emotion holds me, the longer it takes to drain out. I think an artist,
like Almighty God of Genesis hovering over His awesome creation, stops to rest but only when happily
satisfied he can say of his work: It is good.