/* Pinterest website claiming thingie */ /* That's it for the pinterest thingie */ Aberrant Ceramics: Hallucigenia

Pages





Aberrant Ceramics is the artwork of Aaron Nosheny,
ceramic artist and potter in Tucson, Arizona.

I work in the medium of stoneware clay and make hand-built pottery, sculpture, hamsas, ornaments, masks, and a variety of other forms.

I’m a self-taught autistic artist working in my medium for over twenty years. I like monsters, insects, weird animals, body horror, folk horror, horror comedy, horror in general, Halloween decorations, fast food mascots, kitsch – all of these creep into my work, but there’s really no overarching theme.

I am in love with my medium. I love the process of frantically birthing clay monstrosities, subjecting them to an epic trial by fire, and sending them out into the world.



Sunday, August 6, 2006

Hallucigenia

The Burgess Shale is a famous fossil site in the Canadian Rockies. About 505 million years ago, unusual geological conditions caused many soft-bodied Cambrian creatures to remain well preserved up to the early twentieth century when they were discovered by paleontologist Charles Walcott.

The organisms were remarkable in that many seemed to defy classification. One of these was a worm-like creature which was given the name of Hallucigenia, meaning dreamlike. There was an initial confusion over the animal's spatial orientation. Did the strange spikes point up for protection or did it walk on them like stilts? Later finds showed that it walked on the soft tentacles with the rigid spikes pointing up, but it has proved difficult to sculpt that way. There was also a controversy about Hallucigenia's relationship to modern animals. It has been placed in the phylum Onchyphora, in which it joins obscure modern creatures called velvet worms.




Remains of lunch: White Bean and Roasted Garlic Soup and three upside down Hallucigenia.



Hallucigenia as a stilt walker. Not true-to-life, but easier to express in clay.





Hallucigenia as it probably lived. Unfortunately it collapsed every time I tried to render it that way.






Hallucigenia smiling.




Fossil of Hallucigenia.