Sea Salt & Enamels: A Teaching Experience in Murcia

Teaching in Murcia

A teaching experience in the South of Spain.

Written in English.

Travelling during pandemic times is difficult, if not outright impossible. Usually, my job involves a fair amount of travelling and with that, the vibrant and joyful exchange of sharing a common passion in different cultural environments.

With those pale Covid-months stretching across a barren 2020, with no exhibitions, craft fairs, symposiums, workshops and other events to participate in, I feel almost starved of the exhilarating opportunity to exit my own bubble and taste some other reality elsewhere. Travelling, and more importantly, in-person contact with other creative minds, has become so rare that its value has increased dramatically.

So, an opportunity to teach a five-day enamelling workshop at the Escuela de Arte de Murcia this past week was a welcome and precious gift. The school, which actively encourages students to travel internationally via Erasmus exchanges and offers Erasmus staff mobilities to teachers and lecturers, focusses its jewellery course on contemporary art jewellery, especially exploring alternative materials and new techniques. In the midst of our bleak and never-ending lockdown, the jewellery department reached out to me and my partner Alvaro to travel to Murcia via an Erasmus mobility grant and teach a workshop there respectively; Alvaro’s course centring around creative wax modelling techniques for casting, and mine exploring a more experimental and perhaps intuitive approach to enamelling.

The region of Murcia is situated in Southern Spain, bordering Valencia and Andalusia, with the Mediterranean Sea to the East. Travelling to this light-bathed, unknown spot of land really did something for our souls – for both of us, there was an immediate shedding of the darkness that had muted our efforts to create something wholesome and bright during the winter. 

Alvaro’s workshop explored a range of different wax-working techniques, starting with several distinct kinds of modelling wax with their own unique purpose each, and becoming more experimental with the inclusion of plastic objects and organic materials, emphasising the particular preparation of dried plant parts to enable proper casting. The workshop combined all these different wax-working techniques in a final project: creating a modern chimera, an imaginary beast, a creature of all walks of life giving voice to any pluralistic interpretation the students wished to express.

My workshop expanded on basic enamelling techniques with an experimental approach, starting with easier techniques such as dry-sifting and layering enamel, and working towards more complex techniques using vitreous enamel, foil or graphite. Finally, the course encouraged participants to create completely unique and often surprising enamel effects using sand, aluminium, fine silver, organic materials to burn in the kiln, or anything else that might cause a chemical reaction with interesting results during the firing process. The students were tasked to identity and express a particular emotion in their final pieces, one that no single word exists for and that can only be described by explaining the situation it is experienced in. The spectrum of emotions presented in the end – many of them dealing with our current Covid-19-situation – revealed just how rich and varied the scope of individual experiences can be.

 To teach a alongside my partner Alvaro was a unique gift in itself. Even though we both have a history of diverse teaching experiences, this was the first time for us presenting workshops side by side, being able to discuss the studio set-up, the coherence of our planned activities, and the progress of our students. There was a sense of intense, creative flow, in unison. The tapas bar nights and extended walks through the city of Murcia were filled with conversations, ideas, plans for future projects. The unbelievable food experiences here were certainly also responsible for our enthusiasm: Tomatoes that tasted of ripe sun, and perfect olives, and the most exquisite fried octopus, sea food paella, oranges that were so fresh you could smell them from across the street, and everything augmented by the most umami sea salt (which is produced in this area of Spain near Cartagena) and toppiest top quality olive oil.

We vowed to find new way to keep chasing this positive energy and vibrant life force we felt here, not to allow others with a more negative disposition to drag us down back home.

An outing on the weekend to the beautiful Ricote Valley near the city of Murcia: Alvaro in an orchard of peach trees.

We began our workshops with a presentation of our own backgrounds, our work and its philosophical underpinnings.

Alvaro explaining different wax samples and their different uses.

It was incredibly rewarding to see the students become more and more bold and experimental in their work during my workshop.

Final presentation: The students show and discuss their test plates and final pieces.

Caught mid-explanation: Although the language barrier proved to be quite a challenge, we managed to explain, describe, translate and generally communicate in the most creative way. Definitely a rewarding and mind-expanding experience.

My wonderful course of second years for this workshop: On the far right is the jewellery department’s coordinator Noelia García Gallego, on the far left Verónica, who will visit my workshop as an Erasmus intern for two months this coming summer 2021.

Our workshops were followed by a boat trip on the river, organized by the school and our kind Erasmus coordinator, Rocío. Jakaranda trees, Oleander, figs and Tipuana tipus crowded the streets and brought back tender memories from my childhood garden in South Africa.

A local fresh produce market in Murcia, where every vegetable stall seemed to have at least sixteen different types of tomato for sale.

Enamelling Workshop: A glimpse

Preparation: Each participant received all necessary copper and sterling silver parts to create their own Pearlcatcher pendant.

When I hosted an enamelling workshop in my Berlin studio last month, I allowed outsiders an intimate glimpse into my creative enamelling practice for the first time. Previous workshops were always at outside locations such as the University of Stellenbosch or Studio San W in Shanghai.

The workshop included demonstrations, ample time for experiments and trials, lunch, many stories, and the completion of a variation of my Pearlcatcher pendant design. The finished piece and all experiments were the participants’ to take home, of course.

I attempted to convey – apart from my own love for colour and an enthusiasm for playful experimentation – how I feel a sense of a physical space (the studio) and a process (the act of enamelling) merging, where the doing becomes a real space in time. It’s a capsule, an entity, a ritual even, a togetherness that is caught on that day between those exact hours in that exact human setup.

Fierce heat emanating from an open enamelling kiln.

I use a solid granite slab for the hot steel tripods coming out of the kiln to cool down.

Workshop setup in the studio’s front room.

We worked with prepared enamel powders - washed and sifted - as well as small glass ornaments, blobs, and splinters that can create fascinating speckled patterns as they melt into the enamel surface.

A participant working on her first outside layer in light forget-me-not blue.

A workshop participant setting her enamelled piece into its silver setting, with a large cream-coloured pearl caught inside.

A memory of this space will capture the mood in its entire complexity – the light on a grey January afternoon, the smell of roasted lemon-pepper brussel sprouts for lunch, the heat of the enamelling kiln, the texture of sand-like enamel powders, the subtle differences in colours, the stalling of time as it is swallowed by deep concentration and effort.

A glimpse of our studio kitchen almost ready for our communal lunch, which formed part of hosting the workshop.

A scattered display of different enamelling techniques, tools and a tea tray.

I am definitely planning on repeating this experience soon, so keep an eye out for news and dates on my calendar.