This is probably the best example I have to date of the way my sculpture and pottery practices sometimes merge.
I was working on coming up with a new vase so I was approaching it through throwing that week. I was making a basic shape, cutting it, bending the flaps that the cuts created and just generally playing with the notions of ‘2 cuts, 3 cuts, 4 cuts’ and what resulted from bending and pushing out the walls (or not)…I wasn’t attached to any particular outcome. It was just the way the walls bent when I curved in those cuts that left available a perfect ‘perch’ of sorts for a bird to be added.
So on the first few, birds (plural) were added and I loved them. But this last one got the first bird (bust) attached and instead of repeating it on the other side, I realized in that moment that the bird could be seen as flying through the vessel. There may be more in this series with wings spread. All just depends on whether I make time for more exploration of it.
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.
All items in this category
This is probably the best example I have to date of the way my sculpture and pottery practices sometimes merge.
