Ceramic Wales: The Push I needed.

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.