I’ve brought my various ceramics creations home, partly because I keep forgetting to take my camera in, and partly because a few pieces have gone awol from the studio so better safe than sorry. Here’s my first hand built thingamys:
That’s a pomegranate on the left, a couple of fruit halves on the right, and some kind of gourd thing. I don’t know, it just sort of happened. I was playing around with textures a little, the gourd is all fuzzy and non reflective because I kept pressing my woollen jumper into the clay as I formed it. Good fun! We had to make small items that could be used to transport something.
Next we have to work on our final project for the class, using one of our creations so far as inspiration. I really liked the pomegranate and riffed off that with a few ideas. In the end, I decided to turn the little seeds into thoughts or dreams or ideas or something like that, and the pomegranate itself into a head. I’m not quite sure what possessed me to try something so fricken difficult, but I guess stretching myself is the name of the game really. I wish I had a bit more time to dedicate to this class, there’s a whole world of ideas and artists waiting to be explored here. At any rate, I also bought my party finished head home to work on it some more before the next class:
It’s been coil-built, made by rolling out snakes of clay and coiling them on top of each other, then smoothing them out. You can still see the coils inside, which I need to fix up. It’s just big enough to get a hand into (we have to make the final product larger), but due to shrinkage in the kiln will probably only fit a petite or child’s hand once it’s fired. I plan to make little thoughts that can also be fired and will rattle around in the head.
I’ve been giving some thought to the best finish, a glaze or oxide or dye infused slip… for some reason I keep coming back to the thought of gold leaf… I may try to do some test runs on my smaller pieces to see what might work.
See my next ceramics works here.
