Raw glaze tests.

The forms are bisque fired white stoneware. All of them have this speckled surface texture made by the carving tool, and all are coil built so there is not much symmetry and they are very fine.

I made them as tests, in forms and also for glazes.

While being tests these are the earliest initial forms I made in this body of work. All of the forms are thin but strong. I think it can be seen that I have been spending a lot of time looking at rocks and geology in their volume and grounding to surfaces they sit on. With raw glazes, even of differing tones the forms still worked. But once fired the finished results are too loud. But they have worked effectively as tests. I was surprised by how the speckled texture held, and was not smoothed or engulfed too heavily by the glazing, even on the thickly applied sections.

 

 

Above I am holding a high firing pencil. They exist in different colours, and so I can effectively draw on my sculptures and this drawing will withstand 1250 degrees.

 

 

 Within my practice I have been heavily concerned with the raw materials, the finding and processing of the raw clay. Now I am in the stage of firing, and so the clay body is transforming, and glazes and slips are a very present option/stage.  When the clay is bisqued, especially the white stoneware which is not a clay I have found but that is coming from a bag, it feels like a skeleton. As raw, as leather hard it is alive, and then once fired, clay can become static. I want to use this white stoneware clay, it’s properties as a durable, light, flexible body, to expand my understanding of ceramic surface. It allows a back bone to play with. 

 

In glazing and slipping I desire a certain amount of understatement. I think this is often hard to find in most widely used ceramic glazes. All of the tests I did here were using the glazes in the studio. These glazes are Estonian recipes.

I am trying to find an earthy-ness. Something that captures some of the pigments present in the rocks. Broken down very simply this seems to be greens, blues, browns and reds. Above is the green test bowl. All of these individually came out surprisingly earthy not too loud, they carry patches of pigment, the shine isn’t too much. With some alterations these could produce what I’m looking for.

Below is the blue test bowl. In the lighter blue side the drips of bright blue are beautiful, especially when set on the green darker patchwork of background.

There was also a red tester and a black/brown tester, these two were not so successful, too harsh, too strong, too metallic.

 

 

Here are the sample tests of Kunda clay at 1250C. The Kunda clay is low firing temperature clay and so melts at such high temperatures. It is hard to know what will happen to which locally dug low temperature clays, as material from different places reacts differently depending on it’s composition.

The first photo below is the samples before they go into the kiln and the second photo below is how they came out.

 

In the above photo, on the far right is the pure Kunda clay sample, in the centre is Kunda clay with a layer of Turkish copper glaze on top, and on the left is the Kunda clay with a layer of the red ‘magma’ glaze on top. It can be seen in the far right sample that the Kunda clay on it’s own once melted has a natural shine, which I think is beautiful. It’s colour is a rich dark brown holding some other pigments of green. The natural texture of this molten is perfectly capturing the earthy, rock tones I was wanting. These were put in as small experiments and they have came out and will form a whole series of work.

The other two tests of magma and turkish glazes on top show that the Kunda clay can settle and lie very nicely under a layer of glaze. In the magma test the Kunda clay is bubbling through and so visibly mixed with the other. There are some very exciting possibilities for using the Kunda clay as slip, terra sigillata and pure glaze that I will be exploring.

 

The other patches on these tests are chlorides and high firing pencils. Chlorides when applied can hardly be seen  but once fired behave like watercolours. When speaking to some of the ceramicists that also work in the studio they told me of the work of Helle Videvik. She makes many sculptural ceramic works with the effect of rock-like texture on the surface. She has perfected a technique over her lifetime of spraying chlorides with air brushes onto the clay to layer these effects. Her work is the image below.

 

I have also been reading the biography of Lucie Rie who developed an amazing way of layering glazes and textures in her pots. This is one of her pots below.

 

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