Friday Critique: Serving Bowl

            This is a serving bowl. It is 9 inches wide at its widest point, 8 inches wide at its least wide point, and 4.1 inches tall. It is not part of a set. It is porcelain, fired to cone 10 in reduction at Simon’s Rock. The bowl was thrown, and then trimmed. I trimmed all of the extra clay off rather than leaving a foot, anticipating that I would build feet on the bowl afterwards. The feet were made by making a slab and cutting out three triangles the same size from it, then pinching the triangles to the shape I wanted, then attaching them to the bottom of the bowl. 

            Once the feet stiffened enough to support the weight of the bowl, it was placed upright and the feet were adjusted until the lip of the bowl was level. The bowl warped to the oval shape it is during the glaze firing. I can’t say I mind; it warped in a pleasing way. I suspect that this is due to the placement of the feet in conjunction with the bowl being thin throughout. 

            This is a wide bowl, but it is not flat like a plate. It is intended to be used for serving foods such as rice or peas, that need contained in a bowl and are easier to serve from a bowl than a plate. It also works well for foods that have a lot of sauce. It is deep, so it will hold a substantial amount of liquid. An advantage of the feet raising the bowl above the table is that there is no need to put something under the bowl to protect the table if it is holding something hot.

            The rim of this bowl is smooth and rounded. It is slightly thicker than the body of the bowl. The edge of the rim and the rounded ends of the feet are intended to echo each other and compliment the smoothness of the rest of the bowl. 

            The feet are triangular and curved inward with the shape of the bowl. I chose the number of feet based on ease of balancing; three feet by default will all touch the ground, whereas four feet really must be exactly the same length or the object will rock back and forth. I deliberately made the feet tall, like they are a pedestal holding the bowl up for inspection. This gives the object a dramatic shadow, and places it above the surface it rests on.

            The bottom curve of the bowl is also made more visible in this way. The bowl thus appears lighter than it would if there were one foot encircling the entire bottom, regardless of its actual weight. This also places the food inside the bowl higher, as though the bowl is offering the food to the viewer, not simply containing it.

            When I discussed the feet of the dragon cups, I pointed out that they resemble suction cups stuck to the table due to the angle of their profile. With this bowl, I tried a steeper angle. I wanted the feet to lift the bowl up, rather than appear to be securing it to the table. 

            One thing that I found in the process of making this bowl is that placing the feet is much harder if I do not make a guide for where I want to put them. You can see that they are not spaced evenly around the bottom of the bowl. In the future, when I finish trimming bowls like this I will make a circle with a thin tool before removing the piece from the wheel so that I have a guide for the feet. I can always smooth away the line later. 

            I made the surface of the bowl as smooth as I could, both inside and out. One of the qualities that I like so much about porcelain is how incredibly smooth it can become. It almost doesn’t feel like clay when it is compressed so much. When I attached the feet, I smoothed the attachment areas as much as I could to make it seem as though the feet grew out of the bowl.

            When I made this bowl, I thought I would glaze it differently than I ended up glazing it. I was thinking I would use a combination of glossy, translucent glazes that are green and blue. But it was discovered that the green glaze I wanted to use had something terribly wrong with it (it ran right off the pots it was used on – blech!) before this bowl was ready to glaze. So I had a last minute change of plans, and I decided to use very different glazes. I think I like the glazes I used better, anyway. 

            The swirls on the inside are the result of my experimentation with different methods of applying glaze. I found that I can make these swirls of one glaze over another with the help of a slip trailing bottle, and the interaction of the two glazes will create a contrasting texture and color in those areas. I am still practicing making the swirls in different shapes and sizes, but this one worked very well. I might try the same concept with slip in the future. Another possible idea for the future would be to make distinct marks where the feet attach to the bowl to create visual separation between feet and bowl so that it appears the bowl has been set on the feet.

Dragons on wheels

            I imagine dragons to have personalities rather like cats. So I set out to draw a mouse being chased by a dragon, and this is what came out:

            Mouse on wheels! And also, dragon on wheels: 

            Expect to see these guys start showing up on pots in the not-too-distant future. 

On Inspiration

            What do you do when you don’t know what to make next? Or when you don’t know what to write next? What do you look at when you know you want to create something but don’t know what to create?

            Where do you get your ideas from normally when you aren’t stuck?

            When I’m not stuck, I don’t always know what sparks my ideas. Sometimes one idea seems to sprout the next idea and set off some kind of chain reaction of possibilities that I want to sketch out and try. One good brainstorming session might get me months of things to make. But sometimes, I have to consciously search for new things. I run out of interesting things to carve on my vases, but I still want to carve on vases. What do I do?

            One thing I could do is look at what other people have carved on vases. I could look at images or go see ceramic objects in person. I could investigate different techniques that I have yet to try and experiment. But if what is running low is my bank of images to carve, this may not help as much as I would like.

            It is easy to get stuck in the world of clay, and forget that there is the whole rest of the world out there, too.  

            When I am having a hard time coming up with new ideas, I think it is a good idea to step back from clay and look at other things. One thing that always helps me is to go outside and look at all the things that exist in the natural world. Even if I don’t come home with an idea, it reminds me that there is a whole world of living things, and that I belong in that world. And I like to take pictures.

            This tree looks kind of like it has a door in it.

            When I was small, I used to look for trees with hollows in them and imagine what would live in there. Or who would live in there. I imagined nests of birds that could talk, or that tiny unicorns had a stable hidden away inside. Or maybe, if I waited long enough, a dragon would come out.

            Looking at the natural world has always sparked my imagination. I imagine all sorts of creatures and stories when I spend time outside. Even though these things have nothing to do with clay, they are what I like to think about when I work on a piece. What makes ceramic work interesting is often what the artist brings to it from outside the field of clay. I can make a well made cup, and glaze it with some pleasant glaze, and it will function perfectly well as a cup. In fact, there is something satisfying about making good cups with nice glazing, especially in sets. But there are more things in my head than just good functional work. 

            A cup with a dragon on it becomes something more than a vessel to contain liquid. Now that it has that image on it, there are implications to using the cup. There is a reason to choose this specific cup, when most of the time one only feels the need to choose the beverage one is going to have. There is a reason to spend time looking at the cup; it has a picture on it. The picture is something to think about, and maybe to wonder about.

             This is only one way to use an idea from outside the world of clay. Sometimes I look at tree bark, and see a pattern that I want to replicate on a pot. Sometimes I look up at a tree: 

And I wonder about making tree plates.

            Or I see a funny stump with moss and some other small plant pouring out of the hollow, and it makes me think, “Ooh if I made a clay object resembling that shape what an interesting vessel it would make! I wonder if it would make an interesting fountain/vase/flowerpot/what else could it be?”

            You don’t have to go adventuring in the nearest park every day to discover things that inspire you. That seems to work well for me, but there are many other interesting things in the world. Look around at what artists in other mediums are doing. If you work with clay, find a stained glass studio and go see what they make there and what it is like. Or go watch someone turning wood on a lathe. Go listen to the symphony orchestra or go dancing and watch how the people move. The words gesture and form are not limited to pots and sculptures, but can be found in many places.  

A little on fountains

            I am still interested in making ceramic fountains. My thesis became a larger project with a different focus, but I have more fountain ideas that I have not explored yet.

            I am thinking about ways to experiment with bringing living things and water into my work. I could use the clay as the vessel to hold not just the water, but also living things.  

            The fountain that is part of my thesis is not a vessel. The stump is what the water flows over, and it is not intended to hold the water. The mushrooms themselves could be considered as small vessels, as their function is to catch and hold small puddles of water on their surfaces. I made them a little concave on the tops for this purpose. The larger vessel in this case is the pool that the stump is sitting in, which is not ceramic.

            I think the fountains I want to make in the future will be entirely ceramic. I want to start with somewhat smaller-scale objects than my thesis. The pools in the thesis are very large, as I was creating as complete an environment as possible. The fountains I am thinking of now would be smaller and more self contained – more like a slice of an environment than a chunk of an environment. I’m thinking more in terms of a tabletop object that could be placed on a pedestal.

Friday Critique: Dragon Cups

            This is a set of six cups. They do not have handles, and so are intended for cold beverages such as juice or water. They are porcelain, and were fired to cone 10 in the wood kiln at Simon’s Rock. The dragons on them were made by inlaying black slip when the cups were leather hard, after trimming. The insides are glazed with Val Cushing’s amber celadon, and the outsides are not glazed. All six cups were placed in the middle stack in the kiln.

            You can see that they are not all quite the same shape. This was my first attempt to make more than three items the same shape, and while these are close, in the future I think I will be able to be more precise with the form when I want a set. They are close enough to be a family, however, so in this case it is not a terrible mismatch.

            The rims are all fairly identical, which is part of what makes the set a set, despite the individual differences in form. I was attempting to copy the rim of a cup that I particularly like.  It is thin at the very edge, though not sharp, and just below the edge it is a little thicker. I think I succeeded, and I do like this style of rim. It has the advantages of a thin edge while being comfortable to use and pleasing to look at. 

            When I first trimmed these cups, I thought that the feet looked a lot like suction cups. I tried to smooth the edges so that they were a little rounder, leaving a bit of shadow between the foot and the table. I think that this helped some. I do like the angle of the feet compared to the sides of the cups, and the stability that is provided to the form by the side of the feet being flat rather than curved. The body of the cup is like a ball that has been set on the foot of the cup so that it will not roll off the table. 

            The outside surfaces of the cups are smooth, and the dragons are not raised or depressed into the surface. However, there were trimming marks left on the inside of the feet. These marks are attractive, but I am not sure that they are really consistent with the theme of smoothness set by the remainder of the outside of the cups. 

            On the insides of the cups, the throwing lines were left for contrast, although they are not particularly prominent lines. The liner glaze was a bit of an experiment. I was thinking that tenmokus look good in the wood kiln, and those glazes use iron as the colorant. I speculated that amber celadon, which also uses iron as the colorant, would also look good. The olive green that resulted reminds me of the olive green I have seen from tenmoku in a wood firing with a reduction cooling. It certainly doesn’t look like the dark honey color amber celadon usually is. I like the way the darkness inside the cup reflects the black dragon on the outside of the cup.
            The cups were placed with the dragon side pointing away from the fire box so that the dragons would not be obscured by ash. On most of the cups, the side with the ash is arguably just as attractive as the side with the dragon. 

            In places where the ash did encounter the dragons directly, the line between the black slip and the clay is sharper, and the surface is shiny rather than matte. I like this shiny surface, and I think in the future I’d like to inlay patterns or images on all sides of pots and place them in different areas of the kiln to see what gets obscured and what becomes shiny and clear.

            I call this dragon design abstract dragons. The essential parts are there – each dragon has a face, body, wings, whiskers, and horns (or ears; this is up for interpretation). These dragons are simple to draw or carve. The lines vary in width, which makes for a more interesting image than if the dragons were outlined rather than filled with color. I like the design, and I think I will continue to use it with other work. 

On Critique

            An important aspect of creating art is the process of assessing the effect of what you have made. Objects are made with some kind of intent or purpose in mind, whether it is a cup to simply hold a hot or cold beverage, or a sculpture with many parts and a complex message to portray.

            The artist is often focused so closely on his or her work that others’ reactions to the finished piece can be surprising – and very valuable. You may think while you are working that the intent of your piece will be perfectly obvious to the viewer, and yet when you show others they come up with all sorts of different reactions that had nothing to do with what you were thinking. Perhaps it is back to the drawing board, or perhaps these reactions spark a desire to pursue something different for a while. Regardless, it is this interaction between the artist and the rest of the world that is most valuable. Without feedback, it is difficult to impossible to know how your work affects others. As an artist or craftsperson, this is a very important thing to know. It might even be the point of making what we make in the first place.

            Now that I am no longer in school, my primary arena for critique is gone. I will have to find different ways to get feedback on my work.

            Thus, I am introducing Friday Critique posts. Each Friday, I will post images of a pot or sculpture that I am working on, or that I have made in the not-too-distant past, and also a discussion of different aspects of that object.

I’d like to encourage any readers out there to add comments – otherwise it’ll just be me mumbling away to myself with no idea if anybody’s listening or looking. So if you have something to say, don’t worry about whether it’s profound – even saying “I think the edge of that foot is too sharp!” can be helpful. As long as you’re polite about it, that is.

I will start next Friday with the first Friday Critique. I hope to hear from you!  

Dragons

            I have always been interested in animals of all sorts, including mythical and fantastical beasts. When I was little, I thought a griffon would be a really awesome pet. (Never mind that it would terrorize the horses and eat my dog; I could train it somehow to not do that, right?) But dragons have always been the most compelling to me.

            Dragons are not the sort of creatures that would make good pets. They are unpredictable, and tend to set things on fire when they are unhappy. Dragons also tend to be intelligent enough or powerful enough, or both, that they will not stand to be treated as less than an equal. In fact, they usually prefer to be in charge.

            Dragons are epic creatures. They do not do things by halves – if they are angry, they destroy everything they can until they are tired; if they are tired, they sleep for a hundred years; if they are bent on gathering pearls, they will pursue them to the ends of the earth and beyond. They live alone, for fear of some other creature stealing their treasure, but when they have company they cannot resist talking for a while, even if they mean to kill the visitor anyway.

            A dragon’s physical qualities are so vague that dragons can come in all shapes and sizes. There are dragons with friendly temperaments and dragons that are always angry at something.

            These are creatures that are good for stories. They can be hidden away in caves until they are discovered at a critical moment, or they can be fully part of the world and take part in the entire story line. They are a powerful force to reckon with, and are never tame enough that you can assume they will behave a particular way.

            The possibilities are endless, and I like to imagine what sort of stories different dragons might be part of. I like that they are not clearly defined. When I see an image of a dragon, I can imagine him or her to be any kind of dragon with any kind of story.

            When I am making a dragon, or putting a dragon on a pot, I think about what the dragon is doing. I think about whether it is angry or curious or thoughtful. I wonder what other creatures this dragon encounters in its world.

            I hope that others who spend time with my work also wonder these things. Imagination is all we have to make dragons truly come alive.