Further forays into how to create textured vessels led to be the potters wheel and decided to have a go at throwing bowls and the altering the surface using a combination of coloured slips, sodium silicate and heat to stretch and alter the surfaces. Overall I was really pleased with the results, it isn’t something I had done before using the wheel, and the only thing I had to reference from previous experience was the hand stretched vessels I had made inspired the techniques used by Patricia Shone. Below are images of the vessels from green ware to fully glazed. I used oxides as well as clear glaze on the external surfaces and layered lot sof green tone commercial glazes inside the bowls, the overall aesthetic effect was really good I felt, so I decided that they were interesting enough to take to the Visions of Landscape Exhibition. The blue vessel in the images sold at the show.

Continuing with the focus of these pieces being all about the texture and surface finish, I had lots of opportunity to experiment with making work in new ways and at a larger scales than I had done previously. 

I chose three different clay bodies, a grogged red stoneware, a heavily grogged black stoneware and buff body crank stoneware to create a series of shallow, wide bowls that would feature lots of different textures in them.

I used a large shallow plaster former as a slump mould and wanted the exterior surface of each bowl to be really unique, and planned to incorporate some additions to the clay body both on the inside and the outside to explore ways to generate different textures. 

I added china ball clay powder to slabs of black and buff clay and rolled this into the surface, I then dried the slabs with a heat gun and slammed and stretched the slabs onto a board so that the surface would crack and break,  stretching the surface covered in white ball clay and creating fissures in the clay body that created contrasts between the white and the coloured clay.

I then tore up these lsabs into large chunks of slabs and laid them overlapping inside the slump form, blending the surface to create a smooth internal wall and a layered and cracked external wall.

I chose a different technique with the red clay, choosing to press and roll texture into the clay and then drying and stretching as above. Instead of using white ball clay powder on the outside I applied a paste of ball clay powder, molochite, grogg and porcelain slip into the centre of the bowl to create a textured uneven centre area in the vessel.

All were bisque fired, and then various commercial glazes were applied in earth tones, unfortunately the red bowl cracked into several pieces and this was thought to be down to glaze tension as the outside was unglazed. The buff crank glazed side was really interesting with lots of nice reactions between the glaze and the oxide on the inside, the outside walls didn’t quite work for me, not the aesthetic I had hoped for and it would benefit from a further glazing using oxides. The black bowl had to be glazed twice, the colour having just disappeared on first glazing leaving very little behind other than an uninspiring brown! Even on second firing I struggled to lift the ones of the bowl, though the aesthetics of the piece had improved. 

In future I will apply a white slip to black clay at the greenware stage in order to try and manage the application  of glazes and enable the possibility of more predictable results. I will be making some glaze test tiles for black clay to test out different glazes for colour and fit.

I wanted to try and use the things I had learned from experimenting with coloured slips at Uni and from the online course I had taken with Lesley McInelly so I chose to make a series of pinched, footed bowls so that I could practice and experiment with applying slip decoration to a vertical surface.

I used commercial stains and some oxides to create my own coloured slips, I slaked bone dry clay in water, blended it with a stick blender, added stain and sieved it, adding water if needed to make it the right consistency for brushing on.

I tore wide strips of news print and brushed even layers of coloured slip onto the news paper using a variety of colours, I then waited for the slip to dry off a little, it needed to be moist but not shiny. 

I applied the slip to the bowls by pressing and wrapping the strips of newspaper around the wall of the bowl, layering different colours over each other, I was trying to create a distressed look, `I also used a needle tool and paint brush handle to sketch marks onto the surface of the newsprint so the slip would adhere to the vessel just in those areas.

The results overall were very pleasing, it’s tricky to apply the slips in this way on a vertical surface but using this mono-printing technique creates layers of textured slip that look really interesting, there is also the chance to adopt a more gestural, painterly style of mark making to the surface using mark making tools.

After bisque firing I applied very light oxide wash to some of the bowls, followed by a clear glaze. On the insides I used a combination of layered commercial glazes that I felt were compatible with the external decoration.

Am always amazed at the transformation of coloured slips once they are high fired and glaze applied. All these slips and oxides are applied to a crank stoneware  and fired Cone 6.