Tree Study

I took slabs of terracotta earthenware claybody in a wheeled cart along Pendle Water towards the water meetings near my home and studio. I wanted to capture the beautiful textures of different tree barks, roots and any other tree related textures that took my fancy.

This was a lovely way to capture natural texture, it was wonderful to be outside in the landscape working with clay. It’s a really simple process but the effects are really beautiful, interesting and inspirational. I need to repeat the experiment using a lighter stone ware clay to create texture plates that can be used to develop more textures/stamps/sprigs etc. as the bisque fired terracotta was quite fragile and shed clay crumbs onto the soft clay when it was pressed into the terracotta plate.

Here are some images of me capturing the texture from trees with the clay.

As I plan to repeat this experiment again, I chose to apply copper oxide and a clear glaze on these texture plates as I thought they could look interesting if they were hung together as a group on a wall or board. Below are some images of these pieces.