Shared Stories Exhibition - Making Work

I am a member of the Northern Potters Association and applied to exhibit in a group show alongside the Cumbrian Sculptors Association, the exhibition would be taking place at The Storey Gallery in Lancaster.  I wanted to submit work that was based on my interest in the textures, colours and forms that occur naturally in the landscape. I chose to use some of the skills and techniques I had begun to explore on this MA in these pieces. 

​I had also started to look at the work of Patricia Shone after coming across a YouTube video which gave a glimpse of her making process. Shone uses some remarkable textured surfaces in her work and I was interested in looking at ways to create interesting surfaces of my own. I invested in some wooden tools to help me manipulate the clay, I ended up doping some rather random google searches to try and find some tools that I thought would do the job, finishing up with a wooden ball potato masher, a muddler, a stone carving mallet and a porridge spurtle! 

I chose to use a heavily grogged crank clay body to make these pieces, I stretched out the bowl shapes from a solid block of clay, I used a wooden bowl and foam to support the clay ball as I inserted wooden tools into the centre and slowly pushed and stretched the clay outwards to form a bowl shape. I then heavily scored the exterior surface using the side of a metal ruler, a needle tool and a hack saw blade, applying a heat gun to this scored surface and stretching further to create a broken split surfaced texture.

In the top images of the bowl shaped vessel I chose to use white slip and sodium silicate which I dried off with a heat gun, pushing out the clay from the inside in a similar style to Shone’s technique, I applied copper oxide wash to the exterior surface and a commercial crystal glaze and bronze glaze to the interior.

I will be putting all of these pieces into the exhibition as well as some other works I have yet to complete.

I repeated the process below with a red iron oxide wash but felt that the form had slumped too much and the shape was less pleasing as a consequence. There is a commercial glaze inside the piece.

I repeated the techniques again with this next piece, this time without any white slip, just the sodium silicate and the application of a Black Iron Oxide wash after bisque which dripped on the inside and outside of the vessel. There is a commerical glaze on in the interior surface.