CREATING FORMS IN CLAY

to those who may be curious about what i have been up to recently... thank you for your interest! i just finished a raku session @ the ceramic league of miami. if you are not familiar with this technique, don't fret - this blog will help you gain a little understanding.


the reason i enjoy working with raku is that the result is a one-of-a-kind original piece. it is not a "clean" process, like digital mediums, but rather you have to roll up your sleeves (although in south florida we usually don't have sleeves to begin with) and get your hands dirty! i appreciate the physicality of the process and love to create things using my hands.


ok let's start from the beginning!


first ... i had a bag of clay and ideas in my head.

with the first piece, 
my idea began with the sun. a lot of my thoughts are about the sun because of its life giving energy, and our close proximity to it here. i picture the sun as a circle with rings that are always radiating towards earth, towards the ocean. as the horizon meets the sky, the rings of light turn into waves of water.











 


once i had the idea, i then needed to create the form.
i decided to use an extruder to create a hollow tube.
this is what an extruder looks like ...


basically you pack clay in at the top
and use the lever to push it in through,
coming out the bottom like a noodle.

from there i widened the base and drew the lines in lightly around the tubed form and started taking out clay with a small scraper too. once the form was finished, it needed time to dry and i was ready to start the next form!

the next pieces were inspired by one of my favorite high rises, the viceroy miami. this in turn reminded me of the moai, the easter island statues

i am always looking to ancient art and cultures to inspire my work. "these are the living faces of deified ancestors". which spark my curiosity about the unknown nature of these forms, how they got there, who created them, and why. so, i decided to create my own series of moai. of course, mine are much smaller than the originals, which makes them great for indoor living... and who's to say these couldn't be created larger to take the place of those pink plastic snails on the beach and in the gables?
  

the forms were created by hand and hollowed out with a scraper so they wouldn't explode in the kiln. the seed on the ground next to them was used to create the textured surface. there are three moai total in my collection so far, the third you will see soon. 

the final piece i wanted to do two landscape tiles that would stand on their own, or could be displayed together. in order to do this, i needed the clay to be flat. the slab roller was used to flatten the clay. (think, similar to a press, but for clay) 

for the tiles, i didn't do any pre-production sketches. if you look closely you can see the outlines for the border of the two tiles. then, i carved in a design of different layered waves. 

once i had a general outline, i started taking out the background with a small tool by making horizontal lines.

here the form isalmost complete and needed to dry and be bisque fired to make them completely hard and ready to glaze (which is kind of like painting on the colors for the next firing)

OK,  NOW TIME TO GLAZE .... stay tuned for the next step!!!