Álvaro Escalona

Hundreds of thin ceramic rods of varying length hang from a beam like tubular bells. You can make them chime to produce a merry tingling reminiscent, for instance, of Easter bells ringing. Álvaro Escalona reinforces the sounds, playing them back on speakers in the room and subwoofers underneath the plywood floor. Vibrations travel through the body to the fingertips stroking the ceramic rods, inviting us to be susceptible to other sensations and expand our experience of the world. This joyful sensitivity is the essence of Escalona’s EKWC residency. He created a range of ceramic gongs and demolished a second-hand piano to imprint clay with patterns of the piano’s strings, making music tangible. The patterns decorate a set of vertical tubes in which clay slowly dissolves in water while a microphone picks up the sounds. Played through headphones these sounds form an intimate soundscape, unexpectedly soothing both body and mind. Escalona approached his residency experimentally, allowing his ideas to germinate in the process of making. He worked with a variety of clay bodies — black, white and red — and was increasingly attuned to the resonances that different thicknesses and different degrees of firing temperature produced within the clay. Near to the end of his residency, Escalona got hooked on glaze — opening a whole new world of exciting possibilities. He experimented with the combination of bronze and copper saturation glazes, with underglazes and oxide washes.