New Year, New Clay

After exclusively making clay from raw ingredients in college, I switched to store-bought clay about five years ago.  I miss the intimate process, squishing goopy mud through my fingers.  Clay in a bag is easy: Step one, open bag; Step two, cut off desired clay amount.  I don't need to know anything about it to use it.

For the past several months, however, I've been devastated by awful pitting in my glazes, the severity of the pitting oscillating between minor annoyance to such horrifying results that I tell my husband I never want to touch clay again.  After conferring with my clay group, the consensus was that I've simply had a bad batch of clay.  What?!?   How could my frustration and wasted time - months! - be due to "bad" clay?  In my limited experience, one only ruins clay through incompetence, and once you've ruined a batch of clay, there's a lot of motivation to be prudent and accurate in the future!  I don't know how professional clay-mixers test to ensure quality.  Every new clay purchase carries the disclaimer "Test each batch of new clay before using", but I assumed - wrongly, it seems - that this was a general warning for the one time in a million that something goes amiss.  Sigh.

I stopped by Mile High Ceramics two weeks ago, armed with renewed enthusiasm and two dear friends, and picked out a new clay, a darker body suitable both for hand building large pieces and for throwing.  Some clays that can support a lot of weight for larger projects have too much grog or sand that, on a quickly spinning wheel, rubs my hands raw.

Why a darker clay body? I know I don't like the naked color of most light clay bodies after they're fired. In college, I fired exclusively in reduction (propane or wood) and considered an electric kiln only as a handy tool to bisque my work. Once the glaze is applied, a reduction atmosphere draws oxygen from the clay and glazes, adding complexity and variance to an otherwise uniform surface.

There are ceramic artists whose work I adore, and who use an electric kiln exclusively. I, however, have never been satisfied with the results from my kiln, and perhaps it is because I stubbornly expect my work to look like it came out of a gas kiln!  Who knows how much I'll ultimately enjoy this new, darker clay body, but it's a step toward embracing the results from my electric kiln.

Here are some of the test results from my first round of glazing.  I met with the folks at Coyote Creek Gallery in Fairplay last week, and they want to show my work in their gallery (hooray!) including more colorful pieces than my usual earth tones.  I see only neutrals and blues here (the middle test piece was supposed to be more green), but there is good potential.  The middle glaze could go nicely with the nearly-black brown on the left.  Also, I'm curious to see how the second tumbler from the right (actually more of a burgundy-brown) works with the glaze next to it (also below). 

I like this glaze a lot.

Now that I've spent most of the day peering at my glazes, I have to decide what kind throw, and then I'll retire to my studio until dinner!

Better Late Than Never

My New Year's resolution should have been something along the lines of "Don't abandon your blog." Here are the final photos for the series of posts I wrote in September. I'm not sure why I couldn't find time to post these in the last three months; or maybe it was the traveling, holiday enjoyment, and forgetting to take days off from my day job...

I think these photos turned out well.  The show was great, and I look forward to the next project!

Place setting: large plate, salad plate, covered bowl

Drinking vessel

Dessert bowls

Teapot

Fall Colors & More Pots

Ah, the brilliance of aspen foliage. Each day's beauty surpasses the last as green leaves change to yellow gold, orange flame, and stunning red.

Every day the colors intensify beneath an incredibly blue sky.  It's hard to believe it'll end in the next few days, or perhaps in another week, the leaves turning quite suddenly to brown and dropping from the trees.  

As an artist who is deeply moved by the mountain landscape around me, I've been bursting with excitement over the autumn splendor.  If only I could spend every day in the studio, watching the leaves rustle in the breeze, and enjoying a mid-day jog with my puppy companion!  It's lovely to dream...

These are the pieces I finished today:

Tea pot & cups, soup bowl with lid, large goblet, cookie dish.

(It might be fun to take a look back at the previous stage, before I assembled and carved the parts and pieces.)

More condiment servers and a large plate that sits under the small plate:

On second thought, maybe the cookie dish is more of a display for hors d'oevres.

Tomorrow I'll fire my second round of glaze tests (fingers crossed that all goes well) and then I'll bisque these pieces over the weekend.  If my glazes come out satisfactorily, I'll be able to breathe easier...  October is coming quickly!  I can't wait to see what everyone's been working on.  There will be a lot of friendly faces at the opening, since there are fifteen or so artists participating in "For The Table," many of them local clay friends.  One of the regional artists is Tara Wilson.  I had the privilege of watching her throwing & altering demonstration at NCECA '09.

Thank you to the wonderful (and ever-organized) Pam Herring for coordinating this show!

Before and After

A good friend of mine, Nick, visited me in Colorado in June, 2009.  I was teaching an annual clay workshop in the Breckenridge Arts District called Fire It Up.  Nick found pictures from that visit, and emailed them to me this week.

In a pit firing, like a raku firing, the process itself is a lot of fun.  People often ask how pit firing is different from raku, where pots are also a fired at a lower temperature.  One major difference between the two involves the timing of all the chemical reactions (ie, cool effects).  With raku, chemical reactions are brought about once you remove the piece from the kiln, and with pit firing, all those reactions occur during the firing.  Also, it's common to glaze pots for a raku firing, and for pit firing, the most I brush onto a pot is terra sigilata (a clay slip, aka 'terra sig') if I use anything at all.  The effects of both firings are stunning, but very different.

Here I am working on an elephant mask (from that class in 2009).  My friend Rachel is smoothing the bottom of her bird mask.

Texture is important to consider when building a piece for the pit because every indentation or smooth surface remains unchanged through the firing.  There's no glaze to cover up a messy surface.  For the elephant mask, I wanted a smooth, tranquil surface, and I brushed on a warm-hued terra sig to get muted colors.  For the tusk, I used a white terra sig.  White picks up a wide range of colors in the firing: yellows, reds, blues, greens, or grays and black.

I'm demonstrating for Nick that the elephant has its head turned to the side.  One pit firing later, and voila!  I think the mask turned out very well.  I have it available for $60.

New Pots, New Show

I am part of a wonderful, new group called Summit County Clay. We are enthusiastic about sharing experiences, critiquing current work, and problem solving clay/glaze/design issues. What an uplifting group of gals--innovative, full of energy, and positive. Two of our members have organized an invitational show for our new work (and work from selected clay artists from around the state) to be displayed at Arts Alive Gallery in Breckenridge. It's coming up quickly, on October 2nd!

The theme is pottery for the table. A local weaver is creating beautiful place mats for each of our table settings. Each ceramic artist creates whatever dishes s/he wants to fill the place mat. There's another table for serving dishes appropriate for the main course, side dishes, dessert, and beverages. I listened to traditional ideas tossed around that I hadn't considered: specific servers for asparagus, fish, strawberries and chocolate, and many more. There are so many possibilities... I spent several weeks simply exploring design ideas that I could extend throughout all the shapes I'd want to throw (I even snuck in sketches while serving on jury duty). What an exciting challenge!

As an overall theme, I immediately thought of carving my pieces, but how exactly? I made several test pieces, pursuing different ideas (including the carved bowl and pitcher from my last post). I was still undecided when I sold nearly all of those pieces during the summer art festivals. Only a week ago, I settled on my original idea of throwing my pieces thicker in parts and using a faceting tool to carve away the extra clay. I opened my sketchbook and formed clear ideas to pursue.

Off to the studio... Yesterday I stopped suddenly around noon and snapped off photographs to capture the organized process. There are balls of clay waiting to be thrown, freshly-thrown parts and pieces awaiting to be carved and assembled, and completed work drying slowly.



I find inspiration in moving with intention in every step. I keep track of which pieces I want to make in my notebook so that I prepare all the parts and pieces at once. Then I weigh individual balls of clay. To keep all the pieces coordinated without breaking concentration, I like to label each ball of clay (a wonderful, borrowed idea). By naming the clay, I feel like I'm focusing its energy and encouraging its success, like a gardener whispering to her plants to encourage their growth. Here I'm urging T(ea) cup, L(arge) plate, and T(ea) pot!






Meanwhile, the wet pots are slowly firming up: condiment servers and a small plate on the left; soup bowl lid in the middle; cookie dish, goblet cup, and feet for those pieces are on the right. I like the challenge of throwing each piece as thick or thin as I need it to be later (to carve into the clay).




I'm pretty happy with this soup bowl. Its inspiration comes from the small, lidded bowls my family used for miso soup. (The lid is in the photo above.) As an adult with my own family, I prefer a much larger bowl now, but I want to keep the cherished feeling of presenting a generous and thoughtful surprise for each guest at the table--even when it's obviously soup.

The challenge here is coming up with an idea for the knob on the lid. Time to work with the wet clay is running out... I'll have to make a decision in the next few days.


Finally, we come to the finished pieces! Here are serving bowls, a condiment bowl with a spoon, and three tumblers. I'm glad I took so much time to prepare because I'm happy with the forms so far.
Now it's time to think about glazing... I'm not so excited about this part. I get very frustrated with my glazes sometimes. I first thought about glazing these pieces dark brown with an accent of green/blue, but as lovely as that looks on some forms, I think it doesn't work with all of them.

Moving forward, I've found an interesting glaze combination I used on a vase a few years ago. Although I'm wary of using a single glaze on every single piece, I'd like to try this glaze on a test piece and see what I think. Maybe I can make a quick test piece tonight so that I can bisque fire it when I'm back in the studio Wednesday and start glaze tests as soon as possible!

New Work, Old Inspiration

I'm having a great summer! I'm grateful that so many people bought my pots at Alma's Festival in the Clouds, and now I have room for more work in the studio. I've been attending to several different projects, as usual, but am making good progress.

One project was for my brother-in-law, for his birthday last week. Almost without exception, I have to form a clear vision of what to make someone when they request a gift. Luckily, Jesse told me exactly what he wanted: a flower pot for a plant that outgrew its old, plastic pot. He knew what size pot he wanted, and he already had a flower pot that would go beside mine.

The last time I made a normal flower pot shape was in high school ceramics, with my wonderful teacher Ms. Benham. The class lasted only one year, but she has stayed in my thoughts ever since. She encouraged me to express myself creatively and inspired me to adopt the attitude that anything is possible, it just takes imagination. I had a blast experimenting with different forms and styles of construction, and then meticulously decorating my pieces with the school's underglazes. Since Jesse's flower pot reminded me of that ceramics class so many years ago, I decided to mostly use underglazes for the decoration. I'm quite pleased with how nicely the pots go together, and I'm proud of myself for completing it on time! I'm usually behind schedule when it comes to gifts...

I'm also working on a dinner set for a show in October with Summit County Clay. I made a few carved condiment servers in July, and last week I started on carved pitchers. They're angled forward and the handle rests on the "butt" that sticks out. I mimicked the posture of the piece and decided it's a bit of a self-portrait of me in a goofy mood. When I demonstrated the posture to my husband, he laughed out loud.

I enjoy carving pieces; there's a similar satisfaction from cutting into the clay as there is in drastic gestures like chopping off 6" of hair or crushing a failed piece, except that carving has a serene quality of movement, like ripples on a lake. I first started to carve pots in the early 2000s after spending time with Yves-Marie, a potter friend in the south of France, about a half-hour from Spain. We'd work in clay all day and drink bottles of Spanish rosé wine in the evening. He throws very large pots and decorates the carved surface with oxides, much different from my style. I was immediately drawn to his technique of carving and have employed it with my own pieces ever since.

My last project is ongoing, creating work for the High Country Music Festival, which is coming up in only a couple of weeks. Thursday and Friday will be the last days for me to make new pieces. I'll bisque them next Sunday evening and glaze fire all day Tuesday so that they'll be ready to pack up for the festival. Priscilla and I will set up our booth on Friday afternoon, Aug 20, and then I'll sit back and enjoy music all weekend! What a plan.