ExperiMENTAL

A breakdown of my latest project

Dear reader,

I wasn’t organised enough to write this week’s newsletter in advance, so we are coming to you live from the studio today (by which I mean my studio apartment, not the ceramics studio…)

My latest experimental project just came out of the glaze kiln this week! It’s the largest thing I’ve ever made and it could certainly use some tweaks for the future, but I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out anyway. Here are some visual aids before I continue:

It’s meant to be a little side table/lamp combo, which is why there are a couple of holes in the top there. The tabletop is made out of a large slab and the sort of pillar part is three thrown pieces stacked on top of each other and joined together. It’s the first time I’ve attempted a lot of the techniques I used here so pretty scary and also exciting! I think I’ve been resting on my laurels a bit recently, making things that I already know how to make, and scaling up like this was a really good way to push myself and not be too precious about making mistakes. I’m considering it a prototype, using it as a way to find out what works and what doesn’t.

The glazing was a bit experimental too–since it’s so large, my usual techniques were insufficient. It was a lot of awkward pouring, cleaning, more pouring, more cleaning, some weird splashing and splattering, yet more cleaning. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out actually! I left the tabletop raw and I’m still not sure how I feel about it. This was mostly a practical choice rather than aesthetic, since the slab top had already started warping/slumping and I didn’t want it to completely sag. (For those of you who are non-ceramic entities, clay doesn’t love to be hovering in mid air like the table top is doing there, so it can flop down in the kiln if not properly supported.) I decided not to glaze the top and then to fire it upside down to hopefully avoid further issues, which did work for the most part, but now I have this big blank top on an otherwise busy-looking piece.

I am marking this one in the victory column since it was fairly successful overall. I learned some things, made some notes, and have a pretty good idea of what I would do differently on the next one. If that ain’t the point of experimenting, I don’t know what is!

I wish you a jolly week and bid thee farewell until next time.

xoxo

Emilie