Studio Diary, Entry 2: The Bug Situation
I should probably address the bug thing.
If you look at our collection, you will notice a pattern: moths, beetles, scarabs, caterpillars, various winged and many-legged creatures. This is not a random aesthetic choice. I genuinely find bugs fascinating. I have a small collection of dead ones in a porcelain dish on my desk. Just curiosity. They are not rotting and not smelly. Their carcass stays elegantly the same after they are dead.
There is something about dead bugs that is different from other dead things. A dead flower wilts. A dead bird, although poetic, it smells. A dead beetle looks exactly like a live beetle that ran out of electricity. It is still there, but now it is like a tiny abandoned sculpture.
We did not plan for bugs to become half the collection. But now that I am writing it, I guess when you spend enough time looking at something closely, it finds its way into your work. Your life is where your focus is at.
Here are some of the bugs that made it from curiosity to porcelain:
My mom has her own bug-adjacent story. When she was in high school in Ukraine, she and her friends would take branches from a tree, smear them in honey, stick the branch into an ant hole, and when the ants crawled on it, they would lick them. She said that the ants tasted sour and with the sweet honey it was a delicious snack. For us as kids, it was so gross to hear it because we did not grow up in a culture where people would dare to eat bugs.
Though now, a few weeks ago, I found in a local organic shop an energy bar made of crickets. I gave my kids to try without telling them what it was made from. My daughter liked it at first. My son said it tasted funny. When they realized what it was, they both ran to the sink to spit and wash their mouths. It was very funny for me.
None of this directly relates to porcelain jewelry except that our household has a slightly unusual relationship with the insect world, and that probably explains why half our collection has wings or antennae.
Fun fact while we are here: there are roughly 10 quintillion insects alive on Earth at any given moment. That is 10,000,000,000,000,000,000. There are about 1.4 billion insects per human. If insects decided to organize, we would not stand a chance. Fortunately, they are too busy being incredible design references for porcelain jewelry makers.