Transparent sea-walls, making a moon jar, the majesty of 12K leaves: humans crafting nature, in video
Welcome to our occasional series of audio-visual signs and wonders to fly open your doors of perception. This episode is somewhat inspired by the tweet we found above, which purports to show a Monaco sea-wall - and provide a troubling, mesmeric image for the age of rising seas (it turns out to be part of an undersea terrace at Portier Cove, a plutocratic development in the principality). So we went looking for more clips of humans crafting absurd beauty from nature…
From Aeon:
Originally made during the latter years of Korea’s Joseon dynasty (1392-1910), moon jars are rare porcelain vessels crafted from refined white clay. Today, only 30 such artefacts remain intact, making them prized possessions for museums and collectors. While their original purpose is something of a mystery, their elegant, unadorned style reflects the Confucian values of their time.
But, as this video from the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco demonstrates, making moon jars was hardly a simple task. To begin with, their creators had to sift the sandy clay and, with their feet, remove any air bubbles, then throw by hand two matching hemispheres on the potter’s wheel, before meticulously connecting them into one spherical whole until the moon jar was was ready for firing, glazing, and firing again.
Shot in cinematic black and white, this short film follows the Korean ceramic artist Dong Sik Lee as he recreates the process of building an 18th-century moon jar while offering insights into the object’s distinctive qualities and history. You can learn more about moon jars at the Asian Art Museum’s website.
From The Kids Should See This:
Watch as leaves transition from green to yellow to red, from species to species. This observant animated sequence was created by Oakland, California-based engineer and stop-motion animator Brett Foxwell, a side project inspired during the production of another leaf-themed film, LeafPresser.
“While collecting leaves, I conceived that the leaf shape every single plant type I could find would fit somewhere into a continuous animated sequence of leaves if that sequence were expansive enough. If I didn’t have the perfect shape, it meant I just had to collect more leaves…”
“The shape is always out there.”
In total, Foxwell gathered, pressed, and photographed over 12,000 leaves. “They are such wondrous creatures,” he shares on Instagram.
“The universes contained within their shapes and the diversity of their forms have boggled my mind.”