A Year in Clay

It is both alarming and satisfying to realise that I have been working at my MAFA for almost a year. As I sit in Durban, at my parents house for a break from the ‘maritzburg madness, I am trying to trace what I have achieved, in clay, in the last year. I began by pouring through my iPhoto albums – the best records of the visual are visual… Here are a few images of work – still in process in the studio or all finished and installed in galleries.  I started my year in the studio, and this rather ill-kept blog, in February. At first I tried to carry on with the type of work I finished 2008 producing. I carried on with my thrown and wildly manipulated stoneware sculptures. I had been working in a self-conciously abstract way for about 6 months before I started my masters. I worked on some more figurative pieces using my combination of throwing-on-the-wheel-and-throwing-wet-pots-around-my-studio method. This is great fun and I just go through clay like water which drives my fellow postgrads crazy.

My references to cattle forms came and went during the year.

The cattle come

The cattle went away because I burnt their grass.

I participated in a number of shows including the “David Walters and Friends in Conversation with Gabisile Nkosi” at the Wiliam Humphrey’s Art Gallery in Kimberley and the UKZN Ceramics Department Alumnai exhibition at the Tatham Art Gallery in Pietermaritzburg.

WHAG piece

We hosted a great African Ceramics Conference at our department in September which we all worked towards. Just before the conference we were treated to a workshop by Ian Garrett, the burnishing guru. Thanks Ian! It was fantastic – I rediscovered the pleasure of coil-building and finally learnt how to grog clay properly for handbuilding. I am surprised I got through 4 and a half years of art school without this basic skill!

All in all it has been a long, tiring year and I look forward to blogging more in 2010!

The Cow exhibited

Rumination at Rest in Situe at the KZNSA

The giant cow is complete

I am pleased to announce that I have finally completed my biggest project to date – a full size cattle form made of stoneware clay that stands on a perspex frame. It has been a scary but exceptionally satisfying journey apart from the rest of my life coming to a complete standstill to get the thing finished in time. Now I can breathe! Sort of… MAFA crits to grit one’s teeth for this week.

Anyway – back to the cow. I made it in several stages. I started with a cow structure made from chicken wire and stuffed with shredded paper and balled newspaper

 I then threw some huge pots, left them to firm up a little and cut them open. I then placed the floppy bits of clay over the structure to form a full-sized cow skin from clay. I poured a red slip over parts of it. Once it had hardened a bit I cut the chicken wire frame up into more manageable pieces and then cut the cut down to fireable sized bits.

 

Wet cow

 

 

Once dry they were biscuit fired and reassembled as one flat puzzle for glazing. I used a simple matt glaze recipe I had adjusted and coloured the glaze using the same iron rich red clay I used as the slip. I glazed most of the outside of the skin, leaving some parts exposed for aesthetic effect. The inside was painted with a greyish engobe, The pieces were fired to 12oo deg C. Then the fun began – putting Humpty Dumpty together again. I assembled it upside down in a bed of kiln bricks and shredded paper and adhered mosquito netting to the inside of the structure to join all the bits together again. Fun fun – painfully slow and exhausting to paint on the adhesive but I lived to tell the tale. In the midst of all the glueing and things I made some pegs out of porcelain and some pinkish burnished earthenware horns.

I also added perspex ribs to the inside to provide some support and structure. A-frame trestles to support the structure were also made. When the glue had dried and several failed attempts had been repaired the whole thing was put back the right way round on top of the trestles. Wow – it looks wonderful but was such a lot of work. The price of perspex did not help much either.

The whole thing has taken almost 2 months to complete – from initial sketches to fired and assembled sculpture.

The band becomes an orchestra

My trumpet project is going well – structure and flow are now incorporated throughout the process rather than just in the cold assemblage phase after firing. I have been throwing 10kgs at once pretty regularly which has been great fun but lots of physical work. Next stop: will have to work out how to suspend my pieces because the insides and outsides, bottoms and rims are all too gorgeous to hide away!

I’ve got a new project in the pipeline too – back to the cows. I’m building armatures to make skin-like cow forms over – I hope it all goes according to plan because I’m planning to make near-full size cattle which presents all kinds of challenges in terms of making modular sculptural ceramics. I have made large modular forms before using chicken wire and newspaper supports so we shall see if I can control that technique more.

Iron Oxide

 

Rusty

Living in KZN and especially in Durban means that rust is a part of everyday life. My car is rusted. The back security gate is rusted. The front gate is rusted. If it’s metal, it’s rusted. Some of my favourite places to hang out (like the harbour or the beach) have their fair share of rust. Rust drives me crazy (especially where my car is concerned) but is also strangely beautiful. I like the colour. It can stain your hands and be a million shades of orange and brown. I just love using Iron Oxide in my glazes and I love using dark red iron-rich clays. What does this say about my work and my home? Merely superficial? A strange comment about beauty in the unexpected?

Beaching

 

Jbay rock pool detail

The ocean and the beach never cease to inspire me. In the last week I have been released from the studio (or rather I released myself) to go off on a little surfing adventure. The images and textures and colours of this trip were wonderful – lots of shells and rocks and beach sand of many different grades – from shelly and tough on the feet to silky smooth! The eastern cape foliage and landscapes are some of my favourite in the country too! Dry and harsh and barren but the colours really speak to me. They are beautiful in an understated and raw way. That’s something to capture in my work – beauty which is raw and rough.

 

Surfing and making art are two vital threads in my existence. After a week of intense surfing like this I begin to focus a lot more on the essence of catching waves and I have some to the conclusion that art and surfing are far more intertwined than I thought. They are both all about going for it – if you hesitate in the water you are toast. With my art it’s the same – you just have to keep going, take the plunge and don’t think too hard (but never forget to concentrate) or everything looks terribly contrived. Surfing is also about feeling and intuition about knowing when to go and when to hold back. Great art is like that too!

Studio snappies

 

Studio Perspective from my gingham work desk...

wall of things to look at

 

Bits and buckets

who killed Kim?

In an effort to make some use out of the webcam I never use – I though I’d do some sweet and random shots of my workspace for all and sundry to have a look at. This is the place where I make discoveries! (and drink more coffee than should be allowed).

More Trumpets dear strumpet!

I have decided to go forth on a mission to make 40 or more of my new trumpetty bowl forms. They are really such fun to throw and then beat to pieces. Such fun. I’ve glazed them to look skin-like which I hope will be very seductive and a little bit weird all at once. I am aiming to run out of space in my studio (large as it is) in the next month. I am on the lookout for new beating tools… new edges, more raw, more pained. These pieces are perfect to get me in a good mood after a frustrating day at work or varsity.

I’ve also been busy with MORE CHICKEN WIRE. Using it with no gloves can be a bit of an adventure but it really is great stuff to build sculptures on. I’m making a few meter long ‘sketches’ over the chicken wire in preparation for a BIG sculpture: perhaps a figurative cow (heaven forbid I do something figurative – it has been ages). I am working through thoughts on what on earth I’m doing for the Nivea competition I’m involved with. Beauty is… is the theme- so simple and yet so complicated. I think a cow might the the answer – or at least the catalyst for this whole thing. 

To jump around a bit – I have come to an important conclusion about art making just lately – you have to be all in – all the time -it’s not easy, but it’s all about passion. One has to “live the art” , to make good art to entertain a cheesy line. And I often forget – in my obsession with process that art is communicative – TELL STORIES already  - even if they are abstract stories. 

Trumpet detail - green.

I look forward to taking a million pics in the Eastern cape next week – oh beautiful land! Textures of aloes and reefs and rocks are the smell of the sea never cease to inspire me!

Trumpeting from the hills

So much has happened in the lately. Apart from certain exciting financial prospects, I have made some serious progress in the last two weeks. I have also just about run out of clay which has all kinds of practical and psychological effects on my making. Ha ha – at least I;m forced to concentrate on glazing what I’ve already made in the last 2 months. I have finally made some serious decisions about glazing. My glazing is much more subtle than its been – gentle clay-coloured ash and clay based formulas thinly applied to emphasise a theme of plastic clay as tactile in my work. I plan to make some simple engobes too and use them as simple flat colours that catch just a bit of light. I have also been throwing my clay around a lot less and beating it up a lot more. It’s a more destructive approach than my work from November/December and is more closely related to my beaten together cattle forms from May last year. I have made a series of altered bowl-forms that are really starting to excite me. They are open trumpet-like forms which show the interior effect of exterior force on the form. I have made scar marks, cuts, slits, interruptions and impressions on the outside of my forms. This creates beautiful, fresh scarring on the inside. I plan to display them on the floor on a bed of abrasive material that partially masks their exteriors and brings all the attention to the much more subtle interiors. In order to get to this positive point I needed a few things to spur me on: a less than favourable crit at varsity, a series of simple jars that I went crazy on with slip and dry shards of greenware and some attempt at ignoring the kind of work I was making before now. It is so difficult to ignore a solid body of work you have made, but it is so necessary to do so if you want to be free to create, unfettered by the pressure to create ground-breaking work. I have bought some large sheets of paper and I have been forcing myself to bring in my camera every day in an attempt to get me to engage with my semi-accidental forms in a formal; documentary fashion. I have not quite realised this yet but I’m sure this week will be better. My first substantial glaze kiln is cooling as I type and I’m feeling both excited and apprehensive about the whole thing. I have also decided to exhibit a pile of 4 biscuit-fired jars I made as kind of exercise sketches that have received mixed responses. I hope to record the reaction to their vertical installation after the big quarterly assessment this Tuesday.

This piece ended as a sacrifice to the kiln-gods but is just beautiful in terms of the contrast between red slip and white clay.

I have stopped making these “bombs” above but I’m still doing to the surface what I did to these bombs (made about 3 weeks ago or so) in my current work. I’m kind of interrupting the thrown clay.

Um um um battling to get into the flow of things these past two weeks. I have been super busy – but that’s life. Got to get over it and move towards greater productivity. I think I’m moving on from wall panels for the time being to the trusty vessel – no soup bowls and cream jugs though… I’ve been thinking about this chance in ceramics thing. It’s more complicated than I originally envisioned. I am yet to truly get my mind about when my process REALLY involves chance. At least if I start with a vessel (oh um I always start with a vessel) that becomes the given and then I can just go crazy by adding stuff. Like what was said in a crit this morning – sop trying to make your work to closely to your theoretical convictions or you just flounder around.