I started working with the idea of a low, wide serving bowl about a year ago. Just as I feel the “textured bowls” are the work horses, these bowls are intended more for serving than for mixing anything. When they’re not being used for food, they can hang on the wall and be “used” for decoration. I think it was Picabia who said, ‘ The beautiful is as useful as the useful, perhaps moreso.’
And with this vast surface area, I’m free to imagine and spread out a bit with the painting. On this particular bowl, the story is about the 4 birds working together to hold the fragile egg. If any one of them lets it go, it’ll fall so they need to cooperate. But there’s a graphic quality also being employed here and it’s all about dividing the form up into quadrants and using a repeated image to create a visual impact both of the figures AND of the space
Technical Info
Technical Info My functional pottery is made from an earthenware recipe that I developed while I was a graduate student in Nova Scotia. For many years after grad school, I glaze fired to cone 04 which is the convention in this country. In 2005 while I was doing my residency at the Australian National University in Canberra, the other potters there innocently asked, “Why do you glaze fire at ‘bisque’ temperatures?”. That was the first indication I’d ever had that cone 04 might be a suspect temperature to fire earthenware. But I brushed it off mostly because my practice with it was supported by US studio potter standards for terra cotta. Shortly after returning to the States, I offered a workshop at Arrowmont School of Art and Craft in Gaitlinburg, TN. There, fate gave me a GIANT gift…one of my students in this handbuilding class was a ceramic engineer. Go figure. These folks typically never show up in these sorts of classes. But Karla Wagner is anything but “typical”. She and I forged a professional relationship and friendship from that time onward. Karla helped me see the virtue of ‘buying’ temperature for my earthenware. She and I worked together to formulate a satin clear glaze and move my firing temperature up to cone 1-2. All this just to say, these pots are strong, strong, strong. When you knock on them they ring like porcelain. They can go in the microwave without heating up their handles (which happens to lower fired pots). They’re in and out of my dishwasher daily. They even have less than .5% absorption which means anything I make for the garden can live outside in the frozen NE winters w/out breaking.
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I started working with the idea of a low, wide serving bowl about a year ago. Just as I feel the “textured bowls” are the work horses, these bowls are intended more for serving than for mixing anything. When they’re not being used for food, they can hang on the wall and be “used” for decoration. I think it was Picabia who said, ‘ The beautiful is as useful as the useful, perhaps moreso.’
