FLOWERS
The Flower Series started to take form after a visit to the Natural History Museum in London: Mazandi noticed the skeleton of a dinosaur, especially its tail, and was fascinated by the articulation of the vertebrae. Each piece fit into the next in the most extraordinarily simple way. Somewhere along the line, between her longstanding interest in the structure of snowflakes and the dinosaur tail, something clicked and made sense to her. So she ended up creating floral vertebrae and spinal columns that have both an engineered geometry and a sense of Mother Nature in them.
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All of Mazandi’s sculpted ceramics are thrown on a potter’s wheel. Her process is a subtractive one (rather than additive): She cuts and carves the pulled flanges by hand, making each one unique.
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While Mazandi has experimented over the years with glazes fired over various clays including over porcelain, she tends to leave most of her works unglazed, leaving every detail of the raw material, whether usually white or brown, including any grit and grog, visible to the naked eye, as close to its natural state as possible.
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On rare occasion, the artist has worked in colored porcelain, achieved by mixing a stain into the body of the raw porcelain. While this does alter the natural white color of the porcelain, it still leaves her able to work the material and fire it without the additional step of a glaze, still leaving the finished work as close to her hands as possible.
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