Friday, August 17, 2012

Hand Built Pottery Forms

October 26: 11-12:15 a.m. I will do a handbuilding demonstration in East Windsor, New Jersey. I'm part of the live entertainment at a best-in-state senior art show. I didn't enter this show as it is for 60+ (a few years to go yet!) but was contacted to do the demo. Should be fun!

Since I mostly work at the potter's wheel, this became an opportunity to play freely with slabs of clay for a change.

Vegetable server

Ice cream bowl

Textured serving plate

Dessert plate

Square saucer

For these simple projects I used texture tools like a paint stirrer, carved wooden coggle wheel (an actual pottery tool!), onion bag netting, and a dried leaf skeleton. On the ice cream bowl, I added sprigs made by pressing bits of clay in a butter mold and in the carving along the edge of a picture frame, and sprigging them onto the oval bowl.

The bottom three pieces were actually formed very easily, by draping textured slabs over unadorned wooden picture frames. I cut the edges freely to give them a livelier, hand-formed quality. The vegetable server was formed by draping a textured slab over a hump mold I made by casting plaster in a small oblong meat tray.

Textures, forms, play, effort-  it's all grist for the mill! My first workshop in the renovated studio, probably in February to help some of you out of the winter doldrums, will be on making simple slab forms.

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