5 inches high
This bottle design came into being while I was giving a handbuilding demo in my Wednesday afternoon class. I had visualized a bottle made of two shallow, textured, circular bowl shapes put together to form the body of the bottle, but I neglected to visualize how the bottle stand up. When I rested it on the table the bottom half sagged out and the two sections came apart at the top. I pressed the two sections back together at the shoulders and pushed the side of a pencil into the joins to further secure them, after which I added two little feet to keep the form upright. Now I was flying by the seat of my pants so I quickly added a crudely-formed neck that tore as I was handling it and by then I was laughing out loud, as were several class members. I went around all the joins again to make sure they were tight and then I blew some air into the neck to re-inflate the sagging shape and voila, I had created a new bottle design.
8 and 10 inches high
This afternoon, in my own studio, I was determined to use up clay that I was liking less and less so I threw some cilanders and bottle shapes that I will use as experiments in an upcoming raku firing and I altered two of the cilanders along the same lines as my little bottle. The cilanders were wider at the top than at the bottom and when they were a very soft leatherhard I supported the walls on the inside while I rolled texture onto the outsides. Then I pinched the shoulders together, added the necks, and pushed in a few buttons. I added feet to give them a bit of a lift and the final touches were a few more texture lines and a coil around the neck. Because of my throw-away, experimental attitude , I was able to stay loose and avoid trying to control my final outcome, an outcome that pleased me very much.
Wheel Throwing with Nan Rothwell
Still working with very thin slabs, this time making bowls and teacups. I started by cutting out a template from newspaper and once I had a working template, I cut a more permanent one out of cardboard (in this case, bright blue). To make a low bowl like the one on the right, I started with a full circle with a hole cut out of the middle. Then I cut a section of the circle away to make a bowl and the leftover piece was a perfect size for a teacup. You can see the large piece for the bowl, already cut in the clay, and the blue cardboard template for the teacup on the right.
Elizabeth Harris Nichols: from anteater to salmon eater
The sculpture on the left is the first thing I saw at the studio yesterday and I kidded Elizabeth, its maker, about sculpting anteaters now (anteaters are funny, right?). Over the course of the afternoon, Elizabeth turned the anteater into a bear eating a salmon and, at the same time, she threw a series of water jugs. Between jugs, or whenever she needed a break, Elizabeth spent a few minutes working on the sculpture and then she went back to her water jugs. No big deal. Elizabeth makes lots of bears (you can see more of them here) in different poses but this is the first one I’ve seen interacting with another creature. She told me that while she was working on the anteater-like version, she turned to talk to someone for a few minutes and the sculpture flopped over and partially collapsed and when it was pushed back into place it had acquired the movement that brought it alive. Elizabeth’s loose and fearless way of working is an inspiration to myself and others in the studio and her influence was probably one reason that I was able to wing it during the demo that I talk about in my previous blog post.