Sunday, January 31, 2021

From Start To Finish

 I was going through an old folder of images and came across several of my pieces from The Roadside Attraction series back in their early greenware (unfired clay) stage.  I thought I would pair them together with their fired appearance to show the progression.

This first one will show up eventually in its own post (once I complete it), I just wanted to include it so I could talk about being a bonehead while handling my own work.  I was transporting this piece to the kiln room and grabbed the horizontal block projecting perpendicular to the upright block/mass piece, and popped it clean off from the rest of the work.  Eventually I will make a 'sign' piece to replace the block (and just seal it into place with glaze).  The lesson is: stay focused on the task at hand. I just let my mind wander and in an instant later, messed up a piece.  Easy mistake to avoid, and I should know better, but here we are...

In fact, I pulled a similar maneuver with this next piece, it was just later in the firing process.   I wasn't paying attention, and next thing I knew, I had two separate pieces.  Bonehead.  A series of near-comic mishaps happened to this piece between the bisqueware stage and what ultimately came out of the glaze fire.


You can readily see that it's missing a couple of bits...


Don't worry, I saved those 'bits'.  They'll be showing up in a future piece of some persuasion...

Anyway, on to the heart of this post, some 'before' and 'after' shots.










I was really happy to see this next one turn out.  That 'sign/billboard' section on top needs to be thin/light so the piece isn't too top heavy.  Thin/light ceramics tends to be delicate, so it's always a bit of a relief to successfully bring it in and out of the kiln without some minor mishap.  As I demonstrated at the start of this post, I can accidentally smack a fragile piece into another object with the best of them.




There was a similar sense of relief when this one came out of the glaze kiln still intact.




Next time we'll take a look at the two parallel bodies of work The Roadside Atrractions and The blank Scape Vista series.

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