sgraffito

Experimenting with some papers for some chine-colle I stumbled across the paper version of sgraffito. Slow drying acrylic on glossy paper. Its a technique that I love in ceramics and come back to / experiment with often. This paper version could be useful for trying out new designs and colour combinations.

some contour plates I made last year...

...and a moth bowl I made about the same time

text weaving ^2

Current project extended by another two sessions. Think I am wandering off-piste a bit but then thats is where I seem to have most fun... Still working with the same text, I have started to experiment with braille and creating mini concertina books in aluminium.

twisted silk threads merge with handwritten text

squares of writing spiked

moving text into texture

combining (very loose) calligraphic marks with braille

text weaving

A college project based loosely on two main inspirations; Chris Marker's film La Jetee - taking forward ideas of memory and recording; and a sycamore wood bowl by Peter Archer in Hove Museum linking Text - Textile - Texture.   

Text; Date of Origin 14^th c. from 
Latin texere, meaning ‘weave’. Its past participle textus was used as a noun meaning ‘woven material’, and hence metaphorically ‘literary composition’. English acquired it via Old French texte. Other English words from the same source include context, pretext, subtle, textile, texture and tissue. (source; word-origins.com)

lightbox image of first weave - handwritten text woven between silk threads

layers of text painted with acrylic on tissue paper

tissue paper twisted into ropes and woven on a warp of fishing wire

long exposure shot of finished weave

typography

The freeze continues... I managed about 5 minutes in the shed before giving up...

...so I am reverting to a previously made pot ... it does however fit the topic well...

We investigated typography and graphic design in school this week and are continuing to look at 3d typography next week (travel conditions permitting).

Text is always finding its way onto my pots in one form or another.

The Wanderer is an ancient piece of text, originally a spoken story, probably first written down a couple of hundred years before it appeared in the Book of Exeter in the tenth century and as a spoken only piece dating back to possibly 600AD. The author is not known.

Although it was first written down in latin script, when it was still a spoken piece, runes would have been a common form of writing. I chose to translate the text back into runes. I love the way they look and they are easy to carve into damp clay - runes being an alphabet developed before paper which were designed for carving into wood, stone etc.

I wrote the text as a spiral, starting in the middle. Runic script does not have much punctuation and I preferred the way this allows the text to flow.  It also works symbolically as the text runs out with the edge of the pot (somewhere in the second chapter), suggesting that the story goes on and is bigger than its container.