Getting Weird at the National Museum of Ceramics and Decorative Arts, Valencia, Spain

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Sep 28, 2016

If you were unable to guess from yesterday’s post, I’m oddly passionate about sculpture. This is surprising, even to me. If you asked me directly, I’d tell you: God, no, sculpture, ceramics, pottery, all of that is so boring. And yet I find myself buying weird vases and tiny ceramic figurines everywhere I go, and our house is this odd mix of brittle clay things, only some of which have a purpose.

I don’t know when this happened. I thought my transition to weird old lady would be subtler. It wasn’t.

So when I found out that Valencia had a center dedicated entirely to ceramics, two things entered my mind:

That sounds painfully boring.
I really want to go there.

The González Martí National Museum of Ceramics and Decorative Arts is, for the record, breathtaking. At least, it is if you are asthmatic and really like sculpture, which I am and do. It’s located in the Palace of the Marques Des Dos Aquas – essentially a really fancy mansion-turned-museum right in the center of town. You round a corner of a crowded street and you bump right into it. The alleys are so narrow that it’s actually hard to get a clear picture of it, but the facade does not disappoint.

And once I got inside, my brain sort of overloaded. Because SCULPTURE. EVERYWHERE. And so my weird enthusiasm manifested itself as it always does: with adding weird captions to inanimate objects, because that’s what I do.