1 Aug 10

Wonky shelves

my version

I got the idea for these clay shelves from the Loma Panda pottery in Nicaragua, a place that I visited last winter. The Loma Panda version included nine handmade mugs, three per shelf, but several of their “seconds” (the ones that warped when fired) were hung on the wall of the studio and filled with odds and ends. I loved these little works of art so much that when I got back I made my own version.

Loma Panda version

I had taken photos of the Loma Panda shelves but didn’t consult them when I made my own so I didn’t realize until later that the Loma Panda potters do not put any vertical divisions in their shelves. The shelves are easier to burnish without the divisions (all the Loma Panda pottery is burnished and low-fired, they don’t use glazes) but they probably warp more.

I made my first shelves out of paper clay and glazed them with a matt brown glaze, but I’ve since made them out of porcelain without any problems, although I let them dry very slowly. On the back I attach four little lugs with holes through them for wire so that the selves can be hung any way up.

Hanging up my finished shelves put a big smile on my face as I remembered the women at Loma Panda and their weird and wonderful clay creations. (You can read a longer account of this remarkable pottery on my other blog.)

It’s a good day when wonky clay shelves can lighten our hearts, isn’t it?

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27 Jul 10

A Potter’s Workbook by Clary Illian

A Potter's WorkbookSeveral years ago I had the pleasure of spending two days at a workshop where Clary Illian threw pots on a treadle wheel and talked about the shapes she made and her life as a a potter. Her book, A Potter’s Workbook, is much like that workshop: simple and unadorned, yet thought-provoking. With the help of photographs of leatherhard pots, mostly thrown by students, and her own line drawings, Illian discusses the internal space and energy of different cilander shapes, the effects of rims and bases, options for adding handles, spouts and lids, and the dynamic flow of the curve of a bowl. In the concluding chapters Illian encourages potters to train the eye to truly see the curves and proportions of a pot in order to begin to “succeed intentionally rather than by happy accident” and to be aware of the sources of one’s preferred shapes and then move forward to express one’s own voice. Illian succeeds in her hope that this book will “provide a way to see, to make, and to think about the forms of wheel-thrown vessels” and provides a valuable resource for potters who have mastered the basics of throwing and are now tackling the intricacies of form, or for experienced throwers who want to better understand the shapes they produce.

Now I see that a DVD called A Year in the Life: the Biography of Clary Illian is available. Here’s an excerpt:

Life in Clay: Clary Illian extended sequences from atomburke on Vimeo.

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27 Apr 06

Multi-Media

My version of multi-media is clay combined with crocheting—in this case a pinch pot smoothed and burnished on the outside with raku glaze on the inside. Holes punched when the pot was leather hard. Collar crocheted on, shells and shell fragments added. This was the first one I made and now I can’t stop. Crocheting is a soothing pastime when curled up on the couch in the evening. Ran out of “real” shells with holes in them so tried drilling but shells, even small thin ones, are tough. The drill bit got too hot so we sprayed water while drilling just like those people who kept cutting up the concrete outside my old office in Yaletown, an area of Vancouver where the warehouses have been demolished to make way for trendy condos. Too much noise and too many broken shells so I made my own pseudo-shells out of porcelain clay. These will do until I get back to the beaches of Denman Island.

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5 Dec 05

Bathroom Sink

When you buy a sink at the hardware store it comes with a paper template to guide you when you cut the hole in the counter. I liked the shiny new sink but I liked the paper template more because it is a perfect oval and I used it to make a cardboard mould for a large oval platter. With apologies to my vegetarian friends, I plan to use the platter to serve our Christmas turkey.

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26 Nov 05

Horse Hair

On a clear cold Saturday morning I put a burnished porcelain plate without glaze on it into a kiln until it was very hot and I used tongs to pull it out of the kiln and set it on a piece of kiln shelf on the ground outside. As the plate pinged in the cold air I laid strands of horse hair (compliments of a friend’s horse’s tail) across it and watched them curl up and burn patterns into the clay. Individual hairs burned squiggly black lines into the clay and bunches of hairs burned in smoky markings. This was the first time I’d tried this horse hair technique that I’d read about in the magazine Clay Times and I can’t wait to try it again.

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17 Oct 05

Burnishing

Burnishing takes time and patience. Take off your watch. Make yourself comfortable. Have your tools close at hand. I use spoons of different shapes and sizes, smooth rocks, pieces of copper pipe, and metal ribs (thin, flexible, kidney-shaped pieces metal). If I’ve thrown the pot on the wheel I do the first burnishing by securing it back onto the wheel with pads of soft clay and holding a flexible metal rib against it as it spins around. For handbuilt pots and for a second burnish on thrown pots, I hold the pot in my hands and turn it every which way so that I can see whether the shine is consistent on all surfaces. Then I use whichever tool fits the curve of the pot and rub, rub, rub, to obtain a consistent shine. Be gentle and try not to make ridges between strokes. The best time to burnish is when the pot is a dry leatherhard (leatherhard is when the clay feels and looks like leather) and it’s a good idea to make pots that don’t have any little nooks and crannies that your burnishing tools can’t get into. Sometimes I burnish the bare clay and sometimes I paint the pot first with a coloured slip (fluid clay) and then burnish it, but the slip must be allowed to dry to leatherhard or else it will just rub off the pot. On a warm day I like to sit on a stool outside the studio with my back against the wall and cradle the pot on a soft towel on my lap; on cold or rainy days I like to sit beside the window and listen to the radio turned on low. I finish off a burnished pot by rubbing it with my hands to smooth any lines left by the edges of the burnishing tools so that by the end of the process the pot feels like one of my babies. After the pot is fired the surface will be smooth and shiny, even though no glaze is used.

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27 Sep 05

Two Bowls

A friend of mine who comes from El Salvador and now lives in Tillamook, Oregon (land o’ cheese, trees and ocean breeze), asked me to make her two bowls for individual portions of thick soups, curries or stews and she wanted to be able to balance a piece of bread on the rim. Her description reminded me of bowls that a fellow potter used to make many years ago. This potter had spent a lot of time in Japan and one of her standard pieces was what I think of as a traditional Japanese design: the bottom was quite flat, but still had a smooth curve, and the sides were almost straight with a thick flat rim. I used to have two of these bowls: they were made out of groggy brown clay with a Temoku glaze and I used them all the time but the last one broke about 10 years ago. My friend from Tillamook wanted her bowls glazed in solid bright colours so I painted the outside of the bowls with coloured slip, burnished them and carved out the same lines that I used for my scraffito vases and glazed the insides with shiny white glaze. I kept the yellow bowl for my morning porridge and I just found out that every morning my twenty-year-old son, who gets up later than I do, washes it out and uses it for his cereal. For me the bowl works perfectly for microwaving and then eating my porridge, but for him the bowl just “looks cool.”

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24 Jun 05

Scraffito

In a workshop last spring, Judy Weeden made me do things I don’t like doing, like scratching little geometric shapes onto a tile that had been painted with black slip. I hate making geometric shapes. And scratching the outline of an animal on another slipped tile and then scraping the slip off in different areas of the animal. I hate drawing animals. But I liked Judy and other people in the room seemed to be having fun so I put my head down and scratched and by the third tile, on which we were allowed to use more abstract patterns, I had learned a lot about scraffito. Painting a surface with slip and then carving away areas to make shapes creates a markedly different effect than simply painting a shape onto a surface. And textures pressed through the slip into the clay beneath are more interesting than textures pressed into the clay alone. At the end of the workshop there was time to apply the new techniques to our own work so I painted black slip onto half of a leather hard hand-built porcelain vase and carved wavy vertical lines into it. I added a couple of small carved spirals, then burnished the outside of the vase and later glazed the inside with white glossy glaze. This was the start of a series of vases: porcelain with blue or black slip and black clay with several different coloured slips. You can see a few of these vases in my gallery.

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1 Jun 05

Tafoni

Over the last 23 years I’ve spent a lot of time on the beaches of Denman Island, beaches that are made up of wide flat sandstone rock formations that have been weathered into a honeycomb of depressions and holes and a few years ago I designed a bowl based on this honeycomb pattern. When the bowl was leather hard I used an Exacto knift to cut a band of irregular holes around and about halfway up the walls, and I used a paintbrush and a sponge to smooth the edges of those holes. My first small bowl, which I made for my mother, took me three hours to cut and smooth. I’m much faster now but I still love the contemplative work of hand-cutting and smoothing. Last year when a young woman who is a student of geography saw my bowls she recognized that they were based on Denman Island beach rocks and she told me that rocks like that are called Tafoni and the honeycombing is caused by salt crystals breaking up the surface of the rock.

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19 May 05

Sandwich

I was having trouble laying a large slab over a corrugated cardboard mould because the mould is so light that it moves with the slightest push. So I used the sandwich technique: thin board first, then clay slab on top, then a thin cloth smoothed over the clay slab, then mould upside-down on top of clay, then thin board on top of mould. Hold the sandwich together with one hand on each side, then lift and turn over. For large slabs, rest the sandwich on your head and change your hand position so it is easy to put the sandwich down. When you remove the top board the slab (with the cloth underneath it) will be laying over the mould waiting for you to push it gently down inside. The cloth keeps the slab from sticking as it slides down into the mould and it is easy to peel it off when the slab has dried to a firm leather hard.

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