Exploring the uncanny and surreal and an obsession with funghi

I kept putting off what to do with the group of red forms I had made, I had them well wrapped and had gotten them out a few times, smoothed and refined them then put them away again, I just didn’t  know what the next step was. I knew I needed to just try and stop over thinking the process, I began to mock up some possible shapes and realised I was going to need some way of smoothly connecting the spherical  forms to one another, I remembered something from a course I had been on with ceramic artist  James Oughtibridge  so decided to throw some collars/connectors on the wheel which with a wide top and bottom but a narrower centre would serve as a nice connector between the spherical parts. I was pleased it had worked, I chamfered all the internal edges so the edges would sit neatly, I also cut out curved sections on the ellipses as they were being attached to a curved surface, the result evolved and I had some really helpful critical conversations  with my fellow students about the piece which were really helpful. I propped areas with clay wads to enable drying and smoothing in between narrow gaps was tricky but the overall finish was really pleasing.

I love the fact that the piece could be a number of different things, cells under a microscope, macro view of a plant, a weird fungal like structure, I felt the piece had a surreal quality to it.
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Below are the pics of the piece at the greenware stage, I dried it slowly as I was concerned about potential cracking due to various clay thicknesses involved in the piece. It looks shiny in some of the images as it had been sprayed with water before wrapping.