Dunce Cap for Christ's Fools
© 1992 Ginger Henry Geyer
1992, tinted porcelain with underglaze chalk
13 ½" x 5 3/8" x 5"
Dunce caps have been around a long time--Flaubert put one on Charles in Madame Bovary, and Goya used them for even harsher effects in his Caprichos etchings. The humiliation and shame that they pointedly display is still all too common. The process of making this piece was one of vulnerability and foolishness. In its first bisque firing, the carefully constructed cap was badly cracked when a neighboring piece in the kiln blew up. The culprit was a fat, squatty, charming sculpture of Godzilla made by my son Adam. The blow up was disheartening--Godzilla was beyond repair, and the dunce cap should've been declared a misfire also. But I decided that the most foolish thing to do would be to take it in its flawed state and finish it.
I entered the discipline of painting the tiny notebook lines on the exterior and up inside the cap. Working with a tiny brush with a very long handle taught me something about perseverance. Next I used my left hand to simulate a child's script, writing around and around the cap, as if forced to copy a sentence a hundred times. As the cap is turned, we see the punishing "I will not be foolish" becoming shortened, word-by-word, until it gets back to the single word "I". Here a transformation occurs: a new sentence is built word-by-word up to the tip of the cap. It reads, "I will be a fool for Christ's sake" (I Cor. 4:10).
On the interior of the cap is a copy of Adam's drawing of Godzilla, "who cracked this." I'm thankful that such doodling in class did not place Adam, or me, in a corner.