After the breakages and disasters of the last firing, I decided to scale everything back. I still liked the form of the ellipse piece's so decided to construct a couple of smaller versions of that one with a view to adding some surface interest and texture, as well as some of the special effects glaze I had been experimenting with. Below are images of the two pieces I made both in smooth black clay, one one I have used a lichen glaze, and on the other I have used a coloured porcelain slip I made to add a series of small dots to the surface. I was really pleased with how the piece looked with the dots, it created a really interesting surface to the piece, however I was disappointed to see how the house stoneware clear had reacted on the clay body. It does add another layer of interest in the way it has clouded, but although I could blag that this was the case it wasn't intentional. I would like to look at how to either add to slip to enable it to have better adhesion, perhaps adding gum arabic/cmc? Or look for a glaze that can remain raised from the surface whilst retaining a shine as I like the idea of matte and shiny together in one piece. Below are more images of this piece The piece below is another version of the black ellipse sculpture but this time I have added a lichen glaze to parts of the piece and also used some surface textured that I had developed in some smaller discreet pieces that I had been experimenting with (these have been blogged about separately). It was so nice and such a relief to have some successful pieces after a less than auspicious start to the new module. I knew that I had become bogged down by focussing on making complete pieces and this been hampered both by scale and by how I had been feeling. I started to really enjoy my clay journey again at this stage.
I used the recipes found in Linda Bloomfield's Special Effects Glazes book. I had previously used a Marilee Lava glaze with mixed results, so chose Matt Katz Zinc crawl base and Linda Bloomfield's Magnesium Carbonate based Lichen Glaze, both reacted really well with the black clay. I was pleased with the results of testing these recipes and decided that the next steps would be to add the lichen glaze to a smaller sculpture and to add further stains and colours to a fresh batch of this glaze and apply to a white clay body as the 10g of orange stain I had added to a separate batch disappeared on this test. Although I felt this was more likely to be due to the high manganese content of the black clay as it is notorious for just swallowing up colour, I needed to test further on other clay bodies to see how colour responded in the lichen glaze recipe.
Rob has been trying to encourage me to explore different surface textures and develop some special effects type glazes that can work with the forms. The aim of making these small maquettes is to develop ideas that could potentially be incorporated into some larger pieces. I still had some concerns that this may develop into pieces that became cartoon like versions of fungal forms or could look too literal but I was open to trying and am glad that I did as the process was really enjoyable and some interesting things emerged. It was interesting to see what I could do by adding to, piercing and marking the clay whilst still working within the parameters of the ellipse form, some felt more successful than others and it led to the development of other ideas.
In the above examples you can see that I have also combined two different types of clay a smooth black stoneware body and a basic porcelain body. I like the contrast of both the tones and the materials. Contamination of colour was a challenge and weight of some of the additions would certainly be an issue that would need further consideration should some of these be scaled up and incorporated into a sculptural piece. I am hoping that some of these can be developed as small versions of my bigger forms, individual works that can become pieces of sculpture in their own right. Using porcelain slip, am looking at ways to create finer surface structures that suggest sections from a mycelial network of hyphae. Using clay to create fine delicate structures is really challenging and I have a long way to go if I wish to pursue this in a meaningful way. As I was playing around with the different things that could be used, it made me wonder if I could consider using some non-ceramic material that would work with the sculptural forms. This is the seed of an idea and I haven't explored it further as to how realistic or practical it is to do. For these forms I used cotton wool fibres and wool rovings dipped in porcelain slip and then stretched over the surface of the ellipse. I continued this experimentation with organic materials dipped into slip on a larger piece where I used cotton thread and orange stained porcelain slip.
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AuthorStella Boothman Archives
August 2024
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