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.