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I have a very good excuse for not having posted in the past week or ten days or however long, and it is this:

This is a strictly no-gushing area, however, so I will be concise and say only that I went to Paris & Paris has art museums & and I am interested in art, and let you put two and two together and also make you a present of the pictures I took in the Louvre, which, come to find out, has not only the Mona Lisa and the Venus de Milo and ten thousand Chinese tourists waving Nikon d5000s, but also pots! Who knew?

So, to return to the point, I like to make tall skinny pieces, not unlike those immediately below, although those are stone and I didn't make them, but the point is, I don't know how well tall skinny pieces are going to work in the pit-firing process, because they're not very sturdy and likely to crack even in the relatively consistent and safe electric kilns. 

Pieces are also likely to crack in unstable firings (like pit firings, where the temperature of the kiln os not constant) if they have a lot of embellishments, e.g. handles, like below.

So: for fear of cracking, I must avoid elaborate handles, add-ons, and tall skinny forms. I'll still make some such pieces because I have no way to predict exactly how they'll turn out, but I'm worried that if I make a collection of tall skinny pieces with handles they'll all break and my presentation will be me dramatically unveiling a lot of broken shards, at the thought of which my blood runs cold. How, then, can I make my pieces remotely visually interesting? Well, like this, of course:

The above are nice. They are actually made of stone, not clay, but that form will be pretty easy to make on a wheel. The main concern will be not making the lip too thick and the piece itself too heavy.

I really like the above. I've never seen the tiny-handles thing before. I can't tell if they were functional, like maybe they had some kind of handle of organic fiber strung through them which has long since rotted, or if they were purely aesthetic. But I like them and I doubt they would be in great danger of cracking or being bumped in the kiln, so I will try and incorporate them into some pieces based on the above photo.

As for the photo below, these are great, I love them; they're also a great deal larger than the pieces in the previous photos (although maybe you can't tell), and much more difficult to make. So maybe if I have enough pieces to satisfy me towards the end of the project I'll tackle these forms, minus the little pedestal feet on the bottom, because who needs that? And it would worry me in the firings (the feet, I mean).

The pieces with the tiny handles, by the way, are products of the Naqada II and III periods in Egypt, about 3500-3200 and 3200-3000 BC, respectively--also known as the last phases of Egyptian prehistory. And it turns out that in the Naqada periods nobody used potter's wheels, which doesn't sound fun to me, so I'll be keeping the aesthetic--the product--but not the method.

Until the next entry, au revoir, a bientot, etc., ha, ha.

Stamp

I am making progress. To prove that I am making progress, I offer you this:

I made a wee stamp because it's far too much trouble to write my initials on my pieces like a normal person. I didn't invent the design, it's the Hawaiian petroglyph of the honu, or green sea turtle. Remember my non-sequitur happy place in my first entry? There are honu there. I really like honu. I think they are my totem animal. 

I am going to make actual pieces, probably not until after break, because if I make them tomorrow or Friday they'll dry over break and I won't have a chance to trim them and make them nice. Here is the bin of clay which is haunting my dreams saying "use me, use me". Yes, clay bin, I'm coming.

Mentor Meeting 1: The Real Plan

Jocelyn and I had mentor meeting 1 today 7th. (Can I call my mentor Jocelyn? Her other name is Ms. Lutter and she is the ceramics teacher at my high school.) And she is quite wonderful, and many people realize this, which is why the meeting got off to a somewhat rocky start, because people kept popping in and having random miniature conversations with her while we were trying to meet. But we got there in the end. I have a nice new calendar with my whole semester-long plan blocked out week by week. It goes like this:

This week (Feb. 14-18): Research. Begin reading World Ceramics and concentrate on assembling some information about style and form (not about firing yet). I will sketch. I can't draw, so we'll see how that goes.

Feb. 19-27 I am in Paris, France. I will look for ceramics there but I will not look that hard, to be honest. So I count that week as pretty much lost, but I am not worried, because I have a plan.

The two weeks directly following Paris, Feb. 28-March 13, I will continue exploring the bibliography I compiled for my portfolio and I will practice throwing during first period. I will either discard the pieces I make during that period of time or keep some of them for troubleshooting during the first few firings.

The rink where I work/spend every waking moment closes for the season March 13, after which I will have 7th and 8th free every day. So in the last three weeks of March and first week of April (Mar. 14-Apr.8), I will make the for-real pieces, which is a hell of a process. Each piece must start out as clay, which must be wedged, then thrown on the wheel, then trimmed, then permitted to dry to nearly leather-hard, then burnished with the back of a spoon, and then bisque-fired to cone 06 to prevent cracking in the pit. During this month-long period I hope to get fifteen to twenty usable near-perfect pieces (Jocelyn suggested fifty as a ballpark quantity, but I vetoed).

Apr.9-17 is break. Don't know what I'm doing over break travel-wise or whatnot. Wherever I am, I'm going to be planning out the pit and researching materials to use in firings. Then when I return to school on Apr. 18 I'll collect my bisqueware and begin bringing it home to be cast into the fire, etc.

I (and by "I", I mean Jamie, Robbie, Paul, Jimmy, Tim, and John, and myself as overseer) will dig the pit the week after Easter, Apr. 25-30. I will collect materials that week and the next week as well.

I will fire the pit, probably on weekends, during the first three weeks in May. APs are during those weeks so I will be half-hysterical and dancing frenziedly around a really big fire in my backyard will be just the thing.

The fourth week in May, 21-28, I am going to London because why not? Again, I'll keep my eyes peeled for relevant expos and so forth, but I expect to spend most of my time doing touristy Britishy things or whatever.

Then I come home and it's June and where did the second semester go? And then graduation and college and my ass for out of there, as William Gibson so eloquently puts it. Huzzah!

The Two-Week Plan

Today I went to the school studio and wedged some clay and threw a couple of pieces for the first time since July, and I was, to put it mildly, rusty. So I think that once I am exited from WISE class I am going to spend that new morning free period, at least for the next two weeks, in the studio practicing, because I won't fire anything in the pit that isn't as close to perfect as I can make it. I especially need to work on getting the walls of my pieces to be an even thickness--that's partly aesthetic but mostly so they don't break in the kiln--and on compressing the rims so they, too, are even. (I need to get hold of some chamois for that as well; I had some, but it keeps disappearing. *Note to the uninitiated, chamois is goat skin, and it is a magical thing in the ceramic world.)

The other thing I am going to do over the next two weeks has to do with what I did this past weekend, which is go to Washington, D.C. with most of my family, including several screaming toddler cousins, but that does not relate to ceramics. This does: In an effort to escape the aforementioned loud small fry, I went to the National Mall and found, behind the Smithsonian, a building which houses two galleries of Asian art. The Freer gallery, on the top floor, comprises many beautiful jades, painted scrolls, and bronze vessels which were pleasing to the eye; here is my favorite vessel from that collection:

This is a ritual wine container from the Shang Dynasty in China...that's 1300-1200 B.C. 

I love the pattern. Here's some more of the pattern because I love it so much:

The above is gorgeous of course, but the real jackpot turned out to be the Sackler gallery in the basement, where I found this...

....an entire collection/exhibition built by elves for the express purpose of use in my WISE project. Yes.

I took a lot of pictures. A lot. The above is not even a representative sample. I also took pictures of most of the captions of pieces which particularly intrigued me, and the captions are very in-depth and interesting. So the other half of my two-week plan is to study the photographs I took in the Freer and Sackler galleries, begin sketching forms I like enough to replicate, and oh yes, read the book I purchased (50% off!) in the Sackler gift shop. It's called Asian Traditions in Clay and it talks a great deal about the firing methods used by ancient peoples in Asia, including the Middle East, so as I'm practicing the forms I can also begin planning the actual kiln I'll be building, and how it will or won't be influenced by ancient kiln designs.

Lastly, I don't have a time for this yet, but I'd like to visit Professor Jeremiah Donovan at SUNY Cortland, the excellent gentleman whom I interviewed for my portfolio. He teaches ceramics and informally invited me to come and see the studio where he works; Cortland also has a ceramics exhibition up this month which I'd like to see. 

I think that is enough to be getting on with. 

Dear Reader

Greetings and salutations.

I am doing a project for a class called WISE. It is going to be long, interesting, and scary, and involve earth, salt, and fire. I am going to make clay vessels in interesting shapes which I have not yet decided upon, and fire them with various salts and other goodies which will turn them pretty colors, in a pit which I am going to dig, once the glaciers covering upstate New York decide to retreat.

I do not expect anyone to read this blog besides my teacher and my mentor and my community evaluators once the project is finished in June. I don't have any problem with that. I'm not so sure where I stand on blogs as a concept, but it was a choice between this and writing a journal, and this is easier on a whole lot of levels. So hello, readers, and welcome, self, to the blogosphere.

I am going to write about the project that I am doing, and not about anything else, if I can help it. I like pictures a lot better than words, and so I am going to try to put at least one picture in every post. However, since I haven't started my project yet and have nothing to report, here's a picture which, in direct contradiction to the above no-extraneous-information caveat, doesn't have anything to do with my project. But it's my happy place, and I love it, and I like the way it looks on the page.