End of Year Show

End of year show looked fantastic - we scrubbed the rooms up well and with a fresh lick of paint and some new boards they looked like proper exhibition spaces. I think our year was a talented bunch and it was really good to see the culmination of everyones two years. Annoyingly I did not take a camera but grabbed a couple of pics of Jasons facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=oa.423018121083059&type=1

The gold looked great but perhaps a bit strong and distracting from the other more delicate work.

Thats the end of the course and the end of this course blog... Thanks to anyone who stopped by! I am a bit hooked on blogging though so will continue with a post college, big wide world blog at http://stevenwillblog.blogspot.co.uk/

show build

All making finished and after a couple of days cleaning and painting the studio it was time to start putting show together. Discussions with tutor helped refine what goes in and how its displayed. We decided on the pots and we decided to display them on a couple of perspex shelves. I was keen to keep a plinth too - bit of a cliche with pots on it but that was the idea, elevating trash to art and a plinth in a gallery is good short hand...

measuring up

final shelves after hours of sanding saw marks off the edges

gold... a bit tacky but lovely

...and I managed to include my ceramic bin. Nicely hidden around the corner, unlabelled and unmarked. I hope visitors accidently add their own rubbish to it...

Everything submitted now so just have to sit back and wait for show opening...

pulling it together

Last few weeks of project, trying to tie up loose ends. Firstly the bin/print piece. Still not sure about this one but might suggest having it in the corner of the gallery and see how many people add their litter to it... The concept is strong but the execution not so good - think its the rough quality of my bin that is really letting it down.

I always intended to take my litter casts back to where I found their source material and re photograph them. I liked the idea of extending this to leaving behind the porcelain casts with a note asking people to take them home and post photos to a tumblr account of the pots in their new homes... taking recycling even further... This has had to remain a proposal for now as run out of time, something to investigate in the future.

A belgian margarine tub from the beach by Black Rock

a polystyrene coffee cup from The Level

taking casts further

Thinking about how to continue with project post-college I have been combining what I have learned about casting and packaging but opening up my self-imposed limitations to allow bought packaging from supermarkets rather than just found litter to act as source mould material..

display ideas

After waiting two weeks for enough sun (this is West Dorset...), it finally came out for two hours on Wednesday and I quickly made cyanotype print maps of Brighton covering the routes I walked when looking for litter. Prints scrunched and ready to throw in the bin.

This is the first bunch of earthenware casts I made from collected litter. Casts pretty crude but were first step in getting towards more refined porcelain versions. These have just been dipped in an unbelievably thick white glaze.... I expect some crawling (I would have thinned it right down but it was a big new batch at school)

A rather ugly ceramic bin made of coils of crank. Originally glazed grey but the pink clay showed through where glaze not thick enough (glazing seems to be a perennial problem for me). In the end I spray painted it white which is an improvement.

Put the three together...

last casts

Last batch of litter casts in porcelain, glazed in stoneware clear with an iron oxide rim. Waiting to go in kiln the matt chalky surface of the unfired glaze looks good - must try out a bright white matt glaze at some point;

Fresh from kiln, happily sucessful. All the tests seem to have paid off and I have just the right amount of run from the rim. Rushing back to Brighton so only a quick snap, will photo property soon.

final glaze tests

Last batch if glaze tests came out of the kiln today. Lots of work to do on the colours and what forms they fit (I tried the tan and the green on some deep bowls - the tan looked awful but the green great).

I used slip casts from a squash bottle lid found on the beach for the tests, each colour was single and double dipped;

As expected some more successful than others. I reworked the green and the turquoise a bit and they are improved. The red is still bad. The pink is terrible as is the yellow but I dont think I would like them however they came out, they are not my colours...

Final iron oxide rim test. Inner pot with old batch of clear glaze, outer with new batch. Both batches seem to perform the same. Both fired to 1260 degC with a 30 minute soak. Previous firings went 15 deg higher which seems to be crucial for maximum running. I however am beginning to prefer the more subtle line and running of these pots as opposed to the last batch 

easter holidays pt5

easter holidays pt4

Glaze testing. Mostly glaze recipes made from scratch using oxides for colour. A couple of glazes made by adding commercial stain to ready-made clear stoneware glaze. All are transparent glazes. 

Mixed results. The midnight blue-black is beautiful. The rutile tan yellow is good although the glaze crawled - maybe dust on the pot or may have been too thickly applied? 

The chrome green and pale blue both came out way too dark. My scales cannot measure below 2g and so I guessed the oxide quantities and was obviously a bit heavy handed...

I have a soft spot for the pale blue (commercial stain in ready-made clear glaze). The iron oxide and flux rim quite exiting. May try and combine the two, a rusty rim on a pale blue bowl?

I will be photographing the litter cast pots in the surroundings where the source material came from and want to glaze the pots in a way which will help them to look transformed. Pale blue is a colour rarely found in nature / on the beach which would help to make distinctive photos. The rust rim is beautiful and would help unify the different shapes in the group of pots as well as allude to rubbish, decay etc.

easter holidays pt3

Not sure what to say about these pots yet. The colours are not my thing. And I find the shapes inelegant. The red and the black too pale and so have come out grey and pink...

The top photo shows the least unsuccessful vessel. This is cast from an aerosol can lid so its appropriate that its decorated with graffiti inspired imagery. Before putting this idea down to experience I may cast a few more of the aerosol lids to see how they look in a small group - tow or three, and increase the pigment levels so that I create proper red and black.

Its not all a loss however as the japanese tissue transfer patterns worked well and I like the contrasting texture between the glazed and the wax-resist non-glazed areas.

easter holidays pt2

Extension to enclosed top casts from a few weeks ago - I modified the mould slightly so the cast has a small chimney too. Not sure where going with this but its an interesting side-line at the moment..

These pots are in earthenware and I decided to be a bit more spontaneous with their decoration. I wanted to allude to the grafitti I have seen around Brighton while hunting for litter. Using a feather I have layered different coloured slips, added some transfers and then scratched through everything with a sharp needle. Then I added some wax resist with the feather before dunking in clear glaze. Bit of an experiment! Colours not really me thing. Hope the red and black are strong enough, they look a bit pale on the unfired pots.

Against a while background and with only a little colour showing I am quite pleased with the results. A bit nervous about how it will turn out under a clear glaze...

easter holidays

Two weeks in one place over easter means time to crack on with some pots at home.

After assessing first set of earthenware casts I have selected best shapes to take forward and cast in porcelain. These have now been made and biscuit fired. Next they need sanding with wet and dry paper to make smooth and finally glazing...

...glazing never really been my thing. However, I am trying to challenge that by going back to basics and learning how to make glazes from scratch and only using metal oxides for colour. Based on how much I actually enjoyed painting in the first year when I made my own natural paints I hope this will get me into glazing.

I am following recipes from Linda Bloomfields book and carrying out the tests on spare small cast shapes (if I was making the recipes up then I would use little test tiles). I am also trying a few rim treatments with iron and cobolt for special effects. Hope to fire on Saturday so will see results on Sunday.

moving on... a bit

sand-cast from some of the litter I picked up on my walks, above all from Black Rock - some finds not appropriate to make vessels from but sand-casting could be an interesting way to document them.

getting creative about handles... could I combine my schizophrenic town/country life and cast country twigs to make handles for my town pots?

or how about leaves?

first litter casts

a group of unfired casts from the first walk

some of the forms modified to obscure them and make useless. 

I hit on the enclosed top idea while testing out ways to cast a more even rim - the top is supposed to be carved off to reveal evenly thick walls but there is something intriguing about the enclosure, hiding away. It also helps to unify the group and remove them a little from their origins - to be explored further..

test casts

While moulds for found litter drying out I have been exploring plastic food packaging in more detail. I started with probiotic yogurt drink bottles. They are fantastically wasteful - a new tiny bottle for each day... imagine the mountain of plastic waste of a family of four drinking one of these things a day would create...

The tiny bottles are a great size and shape to play around with and I have been casting glass, wax, plaster and ceramic versions of them. Being small I can experiment away without wasting too many resources.

plaster

white glazed earthenware

glass

It has been a great way to investigate form and materials so far and I am thinking of continuing with gold leaf, crystal encrusted and aluminium cast versions - adding value to the disposable and creating permanence are two of the key elements of the project

litter

First part of project involves exploring the city and collecting plastic packaging litter, mapping and archiving as I go...

... surprising lack of good litter in centre, I had to walk to the edges of town to find the best rubbish. Three long walks all started out sparse but hit bingo at the city fringes; Black Rock, Patcham Playing fields and Portslade Beach/Shoreham Harbour.

I am creating slip-cast ceramic versions of my finds - modified in some way to maybe create a new use or perhaps to prevent all use.

While walking I took photos to help visually map my routes...

... images which might influence final decoration of the ceramics or may find their way into a book/images that are displayed with the ceramics. I am trying hard to not be too prescriptive at this point and allow the project to develop organically.

FMP

New year and start of final major project which will take us through till June and the end of the course

beach finds, Black Rock

where next?

College time has run out for the bulb project for now but there are some ideas I will play around with in the future - especially a way of turning the bone china bulbs into small lamps.

neon tubing - could led trips and ceramic tubes create a similar effect?

... and playing around with lighting and looking at the amount of lit signage in Brighton has got me thinking about making bone china ceramic neon text... is it possible?

bulb projections