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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.

Self-taught artist on the autism spectrum. I like monsters, insects, weird animals, body horror, horror comedy, Halloween decorations, fast food mascots, kitsch – and all of these creep into my work, but there’s really no overarching theme. I feel like I'm frantically birthing as many clay monstrosities out into the world as I can.



Wednesday, December 1, 2010

Talz Figure

The Talz are a species from the Star Wars universe. In the films, the Talz are represented by a being known as Muftak in the cantina scene in Episode IV. Muftak is a tall, fuzzy creature with two sets of eyes which is briefly seen sucking some alien alcoholic beverage out of a coffee cup. In Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina, it is revealed that Muftak is a low-level street criminal, that he resides with and protects an impetuous bat-like creature called Kabe, that he hatched from a coccoon, and that was not even aware what species he was and had never seen another of his kind. Finally, the Mos Eisley equivalent of a playground sex-education misinformant had to teach Muftak about the Talzian birds and bees (mostly bees).



The appeal of Star Wars is to do George Lucas' thinking for him. I resisted the urge to give the Talz man boobs. They are clearly not a mammalian species. The fur is more like arthropod bristles than mammal hair. The eyes and mouthparts seem more like an arthropod's than those of a vertebrate. The Talz are supposed to have a pair of day eyes and a pair of night eyes. The day eyes on my Talz' face are too high up to be useful. I attempted to correct this in my second Talz piece, the Talz Column.



Two images of Muftak from A New Hope and one from the much reviled 1978 Star Wars Christmas Special, which I was lucky enough to see on TV at the time. I remember being vaguely disappointed with all the singing and dancing, but still happy to see the beloved characters and universe on television.