The final semester has been all about refining and honing pieces, there have been a number of problems with construction and glaze, and I have allowed myself to become distracted at various points with makes that have moved away from the core work I was constructing.

However, all the piece’s that are exhibited both in the show and as part of my assessment still carry the same narrative. They are all inspired by fungal forms, are abstract sculptural shapes and are all connected together  in some way. I have experimented with numerous ways of connecting the work, glazing the surfaces and refining the makes and am very proud that I have been able to retain this narrative whilst taking risks, developing ideas, getting things wrong, failing lots and learning so much. 

The process has been emotional, physically and mentally challenging and there have been many times when I just wanted to stop and walk away, but I didn’t, and that is the job! The job of the artist is to be brave, brave enough to tell your story, in your own words and then put it out into the world and I fell that this is what I have done.

Success is a funny thing to quantify, it’s subjective and fickle, people’s tastes, aesthetic trends, the current political epoch and capitalism all play a role. I can only measure it from a personal perspective, am proud of everything I have achieved on this MA, academically, as an artist and personally.  I am leaving with having successfully achieved my goal for embarking on this journey, to find a way to develop my own Artists Voice and I feel like I am leaving with the seeds planted to continue to grow and develop this in the future. I know it never stops, and will continue to evolve, but am thankful and grateful for having the time and opportunity to grow amongst such a supportive group of students that will be lifelong friends and with teachers with such great skills &  knowledge.

Unfortunately the holes in the back of the wall piece were not the correct shape to enable them to be securely mounted directly onto the gallery wall with screws. This meant that I would have to mount them in a board. I deliberated a lot about what the background of the board should look like and I tried the pieces with some real wood and it looked too derivative of bracket fungus, I also tried MDF but it was too flexible and easily damaged, in the end I settled for plywood as it was stronger.

The initial plan was to have a white background so the mount board would blend in with the wall behind, however after consultation with Rob, my tutor I opted for black. I even ended up having to buy a second pot of black paint as the first option, an oil based egg shell was just too shiny on the second coat of paint! I eventually sourced  an oil based matt black which worked well.  

I mocked up the pieces in various configurations, I then laid them out on a piece of paper and traced one edge around the forms. This was then cut out to create a  negative space stencil that would help me guide the ceramic elements accurately into place as they were attached. I used a very strong black grab adhesive called CT1 to attach them as I needed something that would be very reliable and strong.

Below is an image of the wall piece hanging in the exhibition space, I am really pleased with the overall effect of this work and it has given me the confidence to develop my wall pieces and explore what other styles of wall forms I could make.

I wanted to include some oval ovoid pieces in my degree show, I had one that I was happy with but would have preferred a couple more options to choose from. With this in mind I constructed two different styles, a stacked piece and a connected sculpture. 

The connected sculpture had some lovely movement to it and I was pleased with how it had developed and all the connections had worked without any cracks or flaws. However I did have some sort of ‘mad’ moment and went completely off track with the glaze. I decided to use a thick oxide paste to try and create a metallic effect (its something that had worked for me before on a different coloured clay body). This work was in red stoneware and the resulting finish just didn’t work at all, I ruined what had the potential to be a very good piece of work, I was so annoyed with myself. I don’t know what made me do it, and I can only think that it was a combination of stress and panic affecting my decision making. Below are images of the piece with the oxide paste. I attempted to sand the oxide with a diamond pad to see if it would reveal a more metallic look but this was ineffective.

The stacked piece was more successful, I had used a new white stoneware clay described by the manufacturer, Valentine Clays as a cheaper alternative to T Material. I was looking for a white clay body that would cope with the stresses I was putting it under and  had bought a bag to test it out. It did not disappoint, it turned out to be a brighter tone than the ES40 and was really nice to work with.

I had deliberately curved one of the supporting posts for my stacked forms and planned to use that one for this piece. The graduating sizes were chosen to be assembled to give the impression of something biomorphic, I thought it looked like it was almost spinal but also plant like. See pictures below. 

I was very reluctant to glaze this piece, I enjoyed the simplicity of the surface as I thought it really highlighted the intricate details in the form. However after some discussion with my tutor Rob, it was agreed that I would use the black crawl glaze on this piece as well. See below.

After the success of my upscaled black piece I was feeling more confident about attempting one in white stoneware. I was careful in my construction process and spent a lot of time on refining the surfaces and ensuring the connections were an adequate thickness to support the free standing additions. I was really pleased with the overall outcome of this piece after the first firing. 

I chose to glaze this using the black crawl glaze, both to give consistency over the collection of work I was making and because I had finally resolved the problems I had been having with it. I do like the piece, but am not as keen on the black crawl as I am on the white and feel like a better glaze option needs to be explored for the white clay body and this is something I plan to do in the future. I may ultimately decide not to glaze the white pieces and fire to a higher bisque temperature enabling them to stay a whiter colour than the creamy white which occurs at around cone 8.

I was keen to try and make a large piece using white stoneware and had started to use ES40 from Valentine Clays as this had a more coarse grog than the ES20 white stoneware I had been using previously. Given the scale of the pieces I was attempting I knew that a more robust clay body would help the larger ovoids  hold their shape. 

Throughout the course I have made a large quantity of plaster moulds, and I needed to create some extra  ones to ensure that I had a sufficient number of graduating sizes available for use, as these are the starting point for forming the curved slabs for the construction of the ovoids.  Below are examples of these plaster formers.

Below is the largest ovoid that was used for the white stoneware stacked piece, the clay tubes used to connect the smaller protrusions to the larger bases are made from either hollow wheel thrown narrow cylinders or large hand rolled coils that are cut and pierced to create a hollow tube.

Despite following the same process of construction, and mocking up that I had done with the smaller scale pieces, over half the individual forms that were made for this pieces cracked during the bisque firing. The firing was a very slow firing with a 16 hour pre heat to dry out the work and initially I thought this was the prime reason why the cracking had happened. However when I examined the majority of the areas where cracks had occurred, I believe that they were formed during construction because the leather hard clay had been subjected to stresses that it could not cope with.

Below you can see cracks in different areas, some where around the holes that had been pierced in the clay ovoid using a tube cutter, the downward force had created stress cracks running out in several directions from the hole.

Other cracks were along the joining seems between the two halves of the slab, it would seem that repeatedly stacking the forms on top of each other at the leather hard stage had created too much stress and invisible cracks that couldn’t be seen whilst leather hard, opened up once the clay had shrunk and had begun to vitrify. See below image that shows this.

I was aware that the rapid drying would have also played a role in exacerbating what happened here, but the resulting outcome was one of disappointment and frustration. I had lost almost a whole weeks worth of work and time but I couldn’t let  it ‘hijack’ my momentum and impact on my motivation to keep going. So I took a day off completely and came back with a fresh pair of eyes, took away what I could from what had gone wrong and right with the last piece and started again. 

I made the next one using black stoneware, I didn’t stack them to mock up the forms, but used callipers instead to work out the positioning of each element, I marked the holes out gently then cut with a fine blade rather than pushing in a circle cutter. This time the forms came out fully intact after there bisque firing. See below

Below are the forms stacked prior to the glaze application, a white crawl glaze will be used on this piece.

Building on the smaller scale black and white stoneware stacked forms I decided to make one in grey stoneware and also to attempt a larger scale one in white stoneware, at a scale that would be big enough to become a floor standing piece.

I followed the same principles of making the forms that I had done previously, and mocked up the stacked effect whilst the pieces were leather hard to decide which orientation and position worked best. I then numbered the pieces so they could be reassembled post firing.

The forms are constructed in a very simliar way to those that are standalone sculptural works with multiple connections, the challenge was to determine how to manage the spaces in between the separate components so they would both sit correctly and look balanced and this took a degree of trial and error to get right.

Below are the separate grey stoneware clay components after bisque firing,.

Deciding what glaze to use on this piece  was tricky, I didn’t particularly like the black crawl on the grey, I felt a bigger contrast was needed so I opted for the copper carbonate lava glaze I had used previously. I wanted the glaze to create a sense of flow and movement, so stacked the bisque forms onto the supporting stand before applying the glaze, these pieces were then supported in the kiln with clay posts to ensure the glaze stayed clear of the kiln shelf.  Below is the piece with glaze applied.

The steel support posts made for all of the stacked forms would be trimmed at the top after the final glaze fire to allow for further shrinkage of the clay body. Below is an example of the posts I had made, I was planning to deliberately rust the bases of these stands as I felt that the warm colour and decayed  look would compliment the work.

I was really pleased with how well this concept had translated into a piece of sculpture, I think it works well and has a very different look to the more traditional ceramic totems that I have seen before.