Spring break has just ended and the first week back has begun. Before break had started, Mark Cole visited our campus for a two day workshop. I’d learned a lot from the workshop and had a studio visit with him where he was able to look at my work and offer some feedback. We’d discussed a partially carved vase that I’ve shown as bisque in previous posts and he recommended that I really exploit my dexterity and my interest in doing small detail work with the surface. So, for spring break, I decided to give it a shot.
Before I get too far into my work over break, I want to talk about my marbled piece I was working on. The mason stain that I wedged into the porcelain always dries out the body to an extent and, once the colored porcelain is combined with the pure porcelain, I have to wrap them up for a while and let the moisture balance out between the two. I was working with much larger balls of porcelain than I had previously tried this technique with, and I didn’t allow enough time for everything to balance out. The result was an off center base (which made everything else slightly off center) and wonky shaped body. Rather than wasting the porcelain and mason stain, I decided to press forward with what I had so I could at least see how the two colors mixed with the pure porcelain looked after it was fired. I was really happy with the results of that firing and am anxious to give the idea another shot.
Spring break started with some glazing and a cone 6 firing. That partially carved vase finally got it’s color as well as the lidded jars I’d been working on. I experimented a bit with wax resist over the glazes to some limited success. While I was happy with the finished pieces, there is still a lot of room for improvement and further exploration into that technique.
Our train kiln is getting close to it’s first firing, and so far this semester, I’ve been mostly working in a cone 6 porcelain. Luckily, Mark Cole didn’t use all the stoneware I’d mixed for his workshop, and I was able to spend the rest of break trying out some ideas on a denser and more stable clay body while still creating work for a wood fire.
After so many months of building up pieces in sections with porcelain, it was really nice switching over to the stoneware and trying the same technique. The sections were much sturdier than the porcelain and were able to be connected much sooner. The grit that made it all possible still caused some issues during the incising and smoothing of the surface, though. I worked around it and really started pushing the incised shapes in the first piece from the stoneware. Despite the grit, the clay body was very forgiving of having large amounts of clay removed from the vessel while still maintaining a solidity in the structure of the piece.
For the second piece, I was starting to feel more comfortable with the material again and decided to break away from the relative safety of geometric shapes and start working more in organic shapes (etchings of a dead leaf from my back yard) and removing much larger areas of the surface.
My BFA critique is on the first Tuesday after break (tomorrow) and I had started debating rushing my spring break pieces so I could cone 6 them before critique. The more hours I spent on the pieces, particularly the second piece, the more reluctant I was to rush. I wanted to really push the detail and wasn’t ready to settle on a quick glaze job on a piece when the entire concept was originally designed around wood firing and the use of flashing slips to bring out the carved leaf areas in the piece. I spent many more hours than I had originally planned to give that piece, paid much more attention to little things that contributed to a more refined surface, and spent a lot of time on cleanup of the surface to make sure it would be ready to receive the same attention after bisque.
Whether the pieces from break will be cool enough from their bisque firing to even get talked about during critique is still pretty iffy, but I feel the work has greater integrity and possibilities than it would had I settled on getting them fired and glazed sooner.
More updates on the stoneware pieces will be coming soon!
