for Laura --
More ceramics:
tall mug, with handle.
one piece pitcher, with handle and trimming. not sure I like what I ended up doing to the base - it was super-thick and I ended up with some wavy-line-ness about an inch and a half down from the line you can see. Meh. whatever. still very proud of this form, and I like the handle.
so there is an ickle alligator. and a monstrous butterfly :)
Also, I have to write a "How I Learned What I Know" paper for my BMC class, and mine is turning into a philosophical discussion about Ceramics. I'm going to throw the (Super-rough) version of that here, and go and ramble about swing dance for a while in the same vein, and then try to figure out if I'm actually answering the prompt. Because we all know how good I am at staying on topic.
Ceramics was perhaps my first love in the arts. Starting in kindergarten, our public school let us create little animal dishes out of clay. I made a turtle, with long arms and legs, a tail and a head. The craftsmanship was awful - all the appendages had small attachment points, the dish-shaped body was inconsistent in wall height and thickness, and the body warped as it dried. The turtle lost a leg before the bisque, lost another during the glaze firing. I remember very little of having instruction in the actual technique of this project, and despite what I now see as a failure in technique, I was so proud of that turtle. Falling apart, missing pieces, it was still something I had made. I loved the idea of having that lasting finished product.
I still love that idea. I see pottery pieces in museums and art history textbooks that have lasted for hundreds and even thousands of years. Fire and water are part of the artworks’ inception and as such, add to the piece rather than destroy it. And even pieces shattered hundreds of years ago can be put back together through a ticklish puzzle. Archaeologists can tell what a piece was used for, how it was useful, and it tells them something substantial about the culture that used it.
I want to make art that speaks to people, not just now, but in the future. I want people to be able to see my personality, and my culture, in the work that I make. So as I learned to work on the wheel, slowly gaining the ability, understanding, and muscle memory to center the clay perfectly, open it cleanly, and raise up the sides to create a vessel, I now know that I have decisions to make. I could raise the sides nearly straight up, and leave the walls thick, to allow the vessel to become a mug where boiling liquids within will stay warm and not burn the hand holding onto the mug. I could pull the sides out, looking for a continuous curve between the base at the center and the lip at the top of the wall, to allow the vessel to become a bowl. Depending on its use, this bowl could be thin or thick, tall or short. I could raise the sides as if to make a mug and bring the clay all the way back in, so that there is a tall column of clay enclosing a bubble of air. This sort of enclosed form allows me to create a lidded container with only minor adjustments to the lid, by cutting off the top of the bubble.
From the turtle to most of the work I do today, I like my pieces to have a purpose. Some are sculptural, but the majority are meant to be used. Trimming feet, pulling and adding handles, pulling or throwing spouts, and creating work of an acceptable weight all factors in to what I do. A beautifully formed pitcher, then, which is too heavy to lift if filled with water, is not what I want.
I’ve experimented with glazing, some applications more practical than others. High fire glazes give a water-tight finish; low fire glazes do not, but low fire glazes come in more colors. If the piece does not need to hold water, or if seepage through the bottom is not a problem, low fire glazes are fine. Sometimes the two can be combined, though the colors will change if fired at different temperatures. Raku glazes can give metallic finishes and beautiful crackling effects, but are not watertight and are a much more complicated process. The majority of the glazing I do now is high fire; I’ve played around with some colored slip decorations. Raku was a treat in high school. We would excuse ourselves from our classes and spend the day outside, in the cold, moving pieces from an outside kiln to a trash can full of combustibles, which would spontaneously combust. Lids were tamped down over the burning materials, and the flames turned to billowing smoke as the oxygen inside the barrels disappeared (a process called reduction) and the carbon from the smoke attempted to wiggle its way into the piece.
I’ve learned a lot from failure. Mine, and others who have worked in my studios and shared triumphs and defeats. I have seen several week’s worth of work dissolve into a slop bucket because someone bumped their work by accident, and it fell and shattered. I’ve made handles which have cracked off of pieces, pieces which have exploded in the kiln because they were too thick, pieces which have cracked through in the base while drying, because I let them get too thin, pieces that dried too fast and cracked, and pieces which were just hideous proportionally. I have glazed pieces that were over- or under-fired and absorbed too much or not enough glaze, tried to put too many layers of glaze on one piece and had to chisel it off of the kiln shelf, and tried to reglaze pieces which were badly covered the first time around. Some mistakes could be fixed, and some served as warnings instead. Some were my fault, some were not.
tall mug, with handle.
one piece pitcher, with handle and trimming. not sure I like what I ended up doing to the base - it was super-thick and I ended up with some wavy-line-ness about an inch and a half down from the line you can see. Meh. whatever. still very proud of this form, and I like the handle.
so there is an ickle alligator. and a monstrous butterfly :)
Also, I have to write a "How I Learned What I Know" paper for my BMC class, and mine is turning into a philosophical discussion about Ceramics. I'm going to throw the (Super-rough) version of that here, and go and ramble about swing dance for a while in the same vein, and then try to figure out if I'm actually answering the prompt. Because we all know how good I am at staying on topic.
Ceramics was perhaps my first love in the arts. Starting in kindergarten, our public school let us create little animal dishes out of clay. I made a turtle, with long arms and legs, a tail and a head. The craftsmanship was awful - all the appendages had small attachment points, the dish-shaped body was inconsistent in wall height and thickness, and the body warped as it dried. The turtle lost a leg before the bisque, lost another during the glaze firing. I remember very little of having instruction in the actual technique of this project, and despite what I now see as a failure in technique, I was so proud of that turtle. Falling apart, missing pieces, it was still something I had made. I loved the idea of having that lasting finished product.
I still love that idea. I see pottery pieces in museums and art history textbooks that have lasted for hundreds and even thousands of years. Fire and water are part of the artworks’ inception and as such, add to the piece rather than destroy it. And even pieces shattered hundreds of years ago can be put back together through a ticklish puzzle. Archaeologists can tell what a piece was used for, how it was useful, and it tells them something substantial about the culture that used it.
I want to make art that speaks to people, not just now, but in the future. I want people to be able to see my personality, and my culture, in the work that I make. So as I learned to work on the wheel, slowly gaining the ability, understanding, and muscle memory to center the clay perfectly, open it cleanly, and raise up the sides to create a vessel, I now know that I have decisions to make. I could raise the sides nearly straight up, and leave the walls thick, to allow the vessel to become a mug where boiling liquids within will stay warm and not burn the hand holding onto the mug. I could pull the sides out, looking for a continuous curve between the base at the center and the lip at the top of the wall, to allow the vessel to become a bowl. Depending on its use, this bowl could be thin or thick, tall or short. I could raise the sides as if to make a mug and bring the clay all the way back in, so that there is a tall column of clay enclosing a bubble of air. This sort of enclosed form allows me to create a lidded container with only minor adjustments to the lid, by cutting off the top of the bubble.
From the turtle to most of the work I do today, I like my pieces to have a purpose. Some are sculptural, but the majority are meant to be used. Trimming feet, pulling and adding handles, pulling or throwing spouts, and creating work of an acceptable weight all factors in to what I do. A beautifully formed pitcher, then, which is too heavy to lift if filled with water, is not what I want.
I’ve experimented with glazing, some applications more practical than others. High fire glazes give a water-tight finish; low fire glazes do not, but low fire glazes come in more colors. If the piece does not need to hold water, or if seepage through the bottom is not a problem, low fire glazes are fine. Sometimes the two can be combined, though the colors will change if fired at different temperatures. Raku glazes can give metallic finishes and beautiful crackling effects, but are not watertight and are a much more complicated process. The majority of the glazing I do now is high fire; I’ve played around with some colored slip decorations. Raku was a treat in high school. We would excuse ourselves from our classes and spend the day outside, in the cold, moving pieces from an outside kiln to a trash can full of combustibles, which would spontaneously combust. Lids were tamped down over the burning materials, and the flames turned to billowing smoke as the oxygen inside the barrels disappeared (a process called reduction) and the carbon from the smoke attempted to wiggle its way into the piece.
I’ve learned a lot from failure. Mine, and others who have worked in my studios and shared triumphs and defeats. I have seen several week’s worth of work dissolve into a slop bucket because someone bumped their work by accident, and it fell and shattered. I’ve made handles which have cracked off of pieces, pieces which have exploded in the kiln because they were too thick, pieces which have cracked through in the base while drying, because I let them get too thin, pieces that dried too fast and cracked, and pieces which were just hideous proportionally. I have glazed pieces that were over- or under-fired and absorbed too much or not enough glaze, tried to put too many layers of glaze on one piece and had to chisel it off of the kiln shelf, and tried to reglaze pieces which were badly covered the first time around. Some mistakes could be fixed, and some served as warnings instead. Some were my fault, some were not.