Brusand, Day 3
Edition: After breakfast Kjetil and I head off to Bryne to get materials for my edition – a version of the baby blue embroidered ring on paper. We take some posters and fliers with us. Kjetil points out the old mill building that he would to see turned in to an arts centre. We call into a fashionable coffee shop to drop off fliers, the manager recognises me from the paper! She asks for a poster as her husband is from Brusand.
The shops in Bryne don’t have stock suitable paper though we buy some ‘emergency’ mounting card just in case we can’t get anything better.
Back in the car Kjetil suggests we might be more successful in Sandnes – a 20 minute drive away. Before we head off we stop at the new studio of the areas best contemporary ceramic artists. From the outside the building looks great – a large double height modern studio/workshop block with an adjacent single storey gallery. Inside it’s just as good, as soon as we enter and I see the man on the phone I recognise him – it’s Jens who I met through the Golden Rain project. We shake hands and say a very friendly hello. It’s really good to see him again. He’s very proud of the new studio where he and his partner Karen have only just settled in, Kjetil and I get a tour. The story of the kiln is brilliant. Jens called a specialist company to come an assess moving the kiln from his old workshop, he man turned up took one look at the old kiln, grunted and walked off. The man gave Jens no indication whether the job was possible or not. A few days later another man turned up and did much the same. Days after that Jens get a phone call telling him to dig out an area of the concrete floor in new studio – the job is on! 10 tonnes of kiln are carved out of the old studio put on a truck and delivered at exactly the time they said it would be. The removal team said they wished every job was a simple as that. There’s a diagonal scar across the chimneystack – it’s where the stack used to go through a roof. All of the old brick chimney is now inside the studio and an modern extension reaches up to the ceiling.
In Sandnes Kjetil has a long conversation with a very knowledgeable woman in the frame studio and we leave with supplies of paper and mount board. I get embroidery thread, needles and a thimble and we head back to Brusand. At the petrol station Kjetil picks up two copies of Jaer Bladet (the regions newspaper). There I am on page 11!
The evening is spent making the edition – it’s the first time I’ve used rice paper, it’s good to work with and I like the way it looks.
