I was relieved that I finally had some work that I would be happy to exhibit at Ceramic Wales, we were going as a group and as such had mocked up how we wanted to lay out the stand. Cath our technician had loaned us the use of her plinths and cloths and we all decided to paint things grey to give a coordinated look to the stand. 

Rob assisted us with photographing the work and a banner was produced for us to display behind the stand.

Pricing the work was more challenging and we did a useful exercise as a group where we all wrote down what we thought the price of  each others pieces should be. This proved both amusing and interesting, as there was a wide range of ideas on value, some of which were based purely on how much a person liked the work and bore no resemblance to the value of the work as a piece of art!

We learned the importance of planning and preparation for a show, considering things like wrapping and transporting the work, the stand, any display materials as well as packing for a weekend away camping in a field! We also worked out how we would take payments and wrap work for customers and organised how we would man the stall.

Below is a picture of our stall set up, we had a right hand end pitch at the far end of the site.

More pictures of our set up including plinths.

Four out of the five of us sold a piece of work which was great, we also had a really fun time! The first evening was a small camp event where we all came together to share food, drink and music. 

The second evening we joined the majority of other potters on site at the "Sausage Club' where everyone pays a contribution and we all share a meal, this one was curry, and it was amazing.

It was a great opportunity to experience what it is like being at a show, what to expect, what to consider and have the opportunity to meet and chat with other ceramic artists. I had a really fun time but it was also absolutely exhausting. The physical work involved in setting up the show both in terms of the making of the and then transporting everything and then setting up is huge, we all shared the tasks between us this time, but as a solo artists I would be doing this mostly on my own and it is very hard work both physically and mentally and I can see how easily you could become disheartened if you then fail to sell hardly any work.  I can see the appeal of the social side of this world and the sense of community it creates, but am not sure that this offsets the amount of work involved and the toll it takes in making this set up happen 6-8 times a year. I realised that if this was something I was going to consider doing I was going to ned some help in doing it, and I needed to explore this again when I was looking at future opportunities.

I was mindful that I may not have enough work to exhibit at ceramic Wales so decided to glaze a piece I had previously finished using wax. The piece was hard to keep clean as it was and the dust had stuck to the wax surface and it looked unsightly. The piece was put through a bisque firing to burn off the wax coating and then a mixture of glazes were applied. I knew it was risky taking this approach, but it also meant that there was a potentially exciting unknown outcome as well. The glazes used were tenmoku, titanium white, satin green and a matte green. Below is the glazed piece before the glaze fire, the clay is a red stoneware body.

This is the piece after glaze firing, I was really pleased with the results, and although the colour palette was a departure  from what I have recently been using, I thought the reactions between the glaze layers created a very organic looking effect which complimented the piece.

As an MA group we are having a stall at Ceramic Wales, there were lots of things to plan and organise including transport, accommodation and preparation for the stand, but foremost in my mind was the fact that I had virtually no work that was of a good enough standard for me to take to sell. I honestly feel at this stage like focussing on making work for an event is just not what I need. Am still being plagued with cracks in work, glazes not working properly and really not feeling in any way resolved in what work I actually want to show to represent myself as an artist. I had very little work that actually had no faults in it!

I seem to find myself feeling constantly overwhelmed and  I am really struggling with organising my thoughts and ideas and find planning things hard as a consequence. I have recently requested an ADHD assessment from my GP as this is something that has been an issue for me all of my life. I have done a lot of research recently to raise my  awareness on this subject, and it has really helped me to understand numerous aspects of how I learn , process and respond to different  situations. It impacts so many aspects of my life that I am only just beginning to understand why I have had so many internal struggles emotionally and mentally. I am seeking a diagnosis with a hope that it will provide some techniques and  strategies to help me better manage my day to day life, how I approach challenges and deadlines in my practice and better understand my own thought processes.

With this in mind I decided to go back to working using thrown connections between the forms as this had worked previously and I could plan this, I also decided to focus on smaller scale pieces connected using clay pads between the ovoids. Below are images of these pieces in progress.

Still mindful of having virtually nothing to exhibit at Ceramic Wales I really pushed to get some pieces made, I had already decided I was going to use glazes and clay bodies that I knew had worked for me so despite the very short window of time I had, I got stuck in!

Given the limited time I had available to me, I had to take a risky decision about firing the work, none of it was fully dry so I used a very slow drying cycle prior to the firing and said a little prayer to the kiln gods !

Below all my damp pieces in the kiln…

Thank fully everything survived the firing! No cracks of faults which was a huge relief. I had chosen to refire a piece I had previously waxed as I planned to glaze it to take to Ceramic Wales, I liked the form but wasn’t keen on the red stoneware when it had been fully fired. 

Below are images of all the pieces I glazed, all bar one piece I had made see (end of post)went to Wales with me. 

I had used the crawl glaze I had applied previously on this place and it hadn’t worked! I later discovered that this was my fault as I had failed to double one of the quantities in the recipe when I was scaling up the volume, so frustrating but a hard lesson learned. I tried to rescue is by overlaying the crawl with a foam glaze, but that just resulted in a glaze that looked, as you can see below, awful. I was so annoyed as this type of form was the one I was keen to show in Wales and I ended up with no white stoneware pieces that I could take.