I’m still trying to work out my ceramic journey – perhaps the joy is in the experience of the journey as much as the sense of finding ‘the’ path? Anyway, after my recent visit to Queensland where I saw a fabulous slab platter I decided that I really needed to experiment with this form. Big thick slab, seeming to float in defiance of their weight and size…. mmmmm….. This beautiful showy glaze covers a lino cut embossed into teh clay forming a rippled surface which is just affecting the glaze and not really visible in the photograph. Its about catching the right light. So this is a path that I am joyously skipping along at the moment, anticipating curves and corners up ahead.

The form that is to be turned into a mould is positioned on a bed of clay then secured with a coddle and more clay to prevent the liquid plaster escaping (in theory, but not always in practice!) and it is left until the plaster is set. Our project is to create a still life using simple forms, and I have taken that very literally and done only three single moulds rather than the more complicated forms that may need up to six separate sections to create the mould. The three forms slipped out of the set moulds easily, so I’m ready for the next stage which we will do this week.

The next step is to pour the prepared slip, which is a liquid clay, into the mould and leave it for about ten minutes before pouring away excess slip. The form is then left to become firm before (hopefully) lifting it out for its first firing at bisque temperature. I wanted to create some sort of display plate for the still life, so I made a few plates and a slab.

I did three thrown plates, each with a different look and feel and the one slab platter which I embossed with a lino cut and pressed some sections of anemone shell into the clay as well, which will burn away in the firing process. The idea was to create a contrast to the very smooth slip cast forms to accentuate their values. So hopefully things will come together!

I often wonder about the time I’m spending on the ceramics and whether this is taking away from my printmaking, but I have found that away from the high pressure of the University program I have a huge amount of time to work with, so everything seems to be happening even though I feel as though I am moving in slow motion! It is also interesting to see another printmaker, Jay Dee, working with the idea of slip casting. I look forward to seeing how she works it into her art practice as well!

The holiday break has been such a great time at home. Not only have I had the fabulous company of my daughters Amy and Abi, but they also kicked me out of the kitchen and made absolutely delicious scrolls! I got to work with my buckets of clay in the process of being refined or prepared for reuse while the smells and sounds of the kitchen drifted through the open window accompanied with the hum of sisterly conversation. This is what a holiday is all about!

Luckily I had one plate that has come through the firing process with some degree of sucess to serve the scrolls with! Using copper carbonate to tone the unglazed surface and affect the glazed area has allowed me to introduce the Queenstown theme to my ceramics. Queenstown, on the west coast of Tasmania, is home to a long running copper mine, the Mount Lyell mine. So the aim is to have some pieces finalised by the time the Osmosis exhibition comes around later this year – fingers crossed!

And so the next page of the book of life begins with the union between clay and print. This interest began with the MFA work and I am very grateful to be able to continue that study through the Polytechnic program. My teacher, Ben Richardson, is a seemingly bottomless source of calmly delivered suggestions and directives as he guides these ‘trained in the paddock’ hands to keep a steady hold on the path to creating more polished and researched work.

At this early stage of ideas and possibilities it has been a matter of testing lots of plates already in existence from the years of printmaking and make some plaster molds to work with as well as learn some more finesse on the pottery wheel – my favourite part! But my traditional printmaking has not been forgotten…..

This is the first print for what I intend to be a triptych – but who knows in the end! It is an etching created using the progressive etch method, with each of the four layers created from the reworked copper plate. So life is busy and full.

While I was at it I added a few things to my blogroll, like the black and white Flash website I built for my Dad’s sculptures, Sculptural Forms and the photo website Photomuse that was really about finding different ways to display a gallery of images in Flash.

I also did some appearance changes to Tania’s Golden Moments Massage website, which I haven’t told her about yet! See how long it takes for her to discover the new look? It is similar to the old one really, just a bit simpler.

So having familiarised myself with the old html code again it is time to move on to something else I guess! Ahh I know – time to work on my son Craig’s mechanical air-conditioning website, Duomec…

Adult Ed pottery has been busy this session. Kim showed up in my lithography class carrying two of my bowls she had just unloaded from the kiln which was a lovely surprise! The glaze is a celedon with chung (white) over the top, and the vases are matt blue with chung.

It has really been about shapes this time, trying hard to make a smooth bowl shape and a useful vase shape. My challenge has been to make a BIG bowl, which so far has been less than big – a bit more on the medium side… But still the day in the pottery studio is a relaxing one and always leaves me feeling calm and content with a little smile on my face. Life is such an interesting twisty path.

Back at the pottery studio again for my weekly class and it is quite a different experience without the pressure of the MFA. The gentle relaxing process of forming a shape on the wheel has got me addicted to churning out all sorts of containers. Above are the incense burners that have become a favourite to make. Lacking conformity in design, as always, they are some sort of relic of history and mutation of the present.

Today the first challenge was a BIG bowl, which I pushed too fast and so it ended up being a medium bowl, then I did a few small to medium bowls like the one above. The first step in the day was to work out what shape I wanted to do. This really helps me as on the drive to the studio it ticks over in the head and the hands seem to get ready to perform the task. Not surprising really, as I see art as an act of breathing out – a steady slow flow through the body of all the gathered thoughts.

But back to the shape – so first thing this morning I checked out a search on the internet for ‘pottery bowls’ which yielded a massive number of pages and a huge number of shapes – very interesting! This shape popped for me and the act began. So much simpler than the years of research that went into the MFA!!! The dark rim on the bowl is a red clay slip brushed on after throwing the bowl.

And the BIG bowl? Well that is now the challenge for next week…

It was a bit exciting at the pottery studio today when I picked up the completed tile piece I have been working on! The ochre glazes have worked their magic and despite some cracks that happened in the second firing I think the tiles are doing what I wanted them to do.

The cracks, as you can see in the tile above, really fit into the theme of the work, being about the difficulties of breaking through the complexities of traumatic experience.

The tiles have to be mounted now so that I can hang them on a wall, so hopefully they will hang together for that! I think they will as they are quite thick and strong despite their apparent faults. Which sort of brings into play that question of perfection – always a non issue for me as I don’t believe in the quest to seek a perceived ideal of perfection. It can be, after all, only one persons vision, or a socially defined expectation. 

But of course there is a degree of expertise, which in the case of my tiles is not of the highest order! But it was a wonderful learning experience and I’m happy to have spent the time and effort doing it. What’s next is perhaps a good question for ceramics, and that will take some time to answer without the pressure of resolving a work for the MFA.

I recently wrote about these test pots, but I thought I would write a complete blog about the test as it was such fun! At this stage the pots have been bisque fired and I have made up glaze mixes using a range of quantities of both red and yellow ochre, clay and whiting.

So this is what the fired test pots look like – quite a different appearance now! So from this group I selected four to work with on the tiles I have made.

Each of the pots has the mix I used to create that glaze written in iron on the bottom of it. This means I can recreate it with some degree of accuracy for the tiles.

I added water to the mix and then painted it onto the tiles. The actual leaf emboss has been painted with temoku glaze, which is a glossy black, and the background is in a range of the homemade glazes. So now they are waiting to be fired, which will hopefully happen this week and I will be able to pick them up on Wednesday, which is my last Adult Ed pottery class for the term. There are nine tiles in the group and they go together to form a design that I hope to be able to mount as a wall piece. So if all goes well, there will be yet another post about this!