Studio Saturday (not)

Instead of pots being made, preparations continue for the MSF fundraiser, which starts next weekend. But pots, and a return to the ceramics studio, are very much on my mind, especially after the visit to Ceramic Art London....

"Sewing companions" for sale -

 12" square quiltlets, mounted on canvases -

 6"x12" pieces mounted to fit A3 frames -

 7"x10" quiltlets mounted to fit A3 frames -

They contain "travel lines" fabric, screenprinted in 2011 when I was doing the art MA at Camberwell -

Ceramic Art London

As much as seeing the actual pots at Ceramic Art London, I love to sit in the lecture room and take in whatever is on offer.

First, some pots -

Rebecca Appleby

Richard St John Heeley

Rowena Brown

Justine Allison

Alison Gautrey

Anna Lambert

Monika Debus

Now, the talks ...

Tristram Hunt was once an MP but is now head honcho at the V&A, a world-leader museum with 2.3 million artefacts in its collection, which was started as a "museum of manufacture" in 1852. With an increasing number of sites (eg Dundee with its Scottish galleries), the museum is an example of cosmopolitanism in an age of (increasing?) chauvinism. One of the questions from the audience was, instead of or in addition to sending physical exhibitions out to various venues, could the museum make films of the exhibition, to be shown in cinemas perhaps to a paying audience?

John Wilson of Darwen Terracotta revealed his rescue mission - the skills of 40 workers at when the "heritage restoration" section of long-established Shaw's of Darwen was closed by the company's new owners, the skills of 40 workers were about to be lost - so John and a colleague started a new company to employ them. It is now getting a shed-load of work and apprentices are being trained to fill in when the older guys retire. Fabulous project and an inspiring talk -- as well as an eye-opener for ceramics used in new-builds and as restoration (eg in the Natural History Museum).

Grant Gibson, former editor of Crafts magazine and interviewer of many craftspeople, was interviewed in the final talk of the day. He has started a podcast (Material Matters with Grant Gibson) which has makers talking about their materials - eg Edmund de Waal on procelain, Peter Layton on glass, Celia Pym on darning. Let's hope it continues.

Poetry Thursday - Syptom Recital by Dorothy Parker

First published 1952, this edition 1965 (love the cover!)

Symptom Recital

I do not like my state of mind;
I'm bitter, querulous, unkind.
I hate my legs, I hate my hands,
I do not yearn for lovelier lands.
I dread the dawn's recurrent light;
I hate to go to bed at night.
I snoot at simple, earnest folk.
I cannot take the gentlest joke.
I find no peace in paint or type.
My world is but a lot of tripe.
I'm disillusioned, empty-breasted.
For what I think, I'd be arrested.
I am not sick, I am not well.
My quondam dreams are shot to hell.
My soul is crushed, my spirit sore;
I do not like me any more.
I cavil, quarrel, grumble, grouse.
I ponder on the narrow house.
I shudder at the thought of men....
I'm due to fall in love again. 

Dorothy Parker (via)

Sounds rather like cabin fever, that sort of state of mind....

Woodblock Wednesday - last class this term

At home I reviewed my circle work and thought ahead to what to do next, then enlarged the "penumbra" of one of the fuzzy circles cut earlier.

In class - printing -

messy edges

Using a mask around the edge, and inking up in two colours

I also used the mask to print the lines in the centre and the fuzzy edges around them, but the registration was ad hoc and very sloppy. The mask should be the exact size of the paper! -

 End of term means we lay out our work and have a look -

 Some close-ups -

 At the start of the class, while we were waiting for blocks and papers to reach the required degree of dampness, we learned a little about bonsai - what a huge topic that is! Also on the table, natural pigments for printing experiments - some are said to need no nori...

I dug out the remaining "binders keepers" - what was intended as a way of carrying around the essential bookbinding tools turns out to be just the right size for woodblock cutting tools -

When I make more, there will be wider slots to accomodate tools with bigger handles.

Drawing Tuesday - Petrie Museum

We hadn't been to the Petrie for quite a while, and there's always lots to choose from. And tables to sit at, right in front of the cases!

The 2nd-century funeral portraits always captivate me, and there's a book about them lying on the big central table. An earlier effort to "get a likeness" had (ahem) mixed results, so I decided to have another go.

Warm up:  continuous line drawn blind with non-dominant hand

Drawn with biro. It's worth getting the proportions right!

Then and now...

Janet B's pots, large and small, in one case -

 Carol's fragment and entire portrait head - "getting it to look ike gold" -

 Sue's reconstructed tile floor -

 Mags' accumulation of pots, using her new earth-coloured marker pens -

Extracurricular acitivities

Carol had a go at the life-drawing on the RA website

Mags had a great time at a textiles retreat, "mapping"
her walks on long strips of fabric

Almost spring

The cold winds of the past wee while have been ... unpleasant. Today was definitely an improvement, weather-wise. After an afternoon indoors watching Freya asleep and awake - the big arm movements during sleep; the just-getting-focussed gaze - I had a lovely walk home, the long way round, through some of the grander back streets of Crouch End (note the almost-full moon) -

 and those luminous clouds will soon disappear behind trees-in-leaf -

All is not always bliss with new babies - already she doesn't seem to like being labelled "tiny dreamer." - and who could blame her? -

Photographing the sun's journey

One of my favourite parts of The Sun exhibition at the Science Museum (till 6 May) was the Solargraphy project, designed and coordinated by Tarya Trygg, photography lecturer in Finland. The project is part of her PhD work.

Participants set up a pinhole camera and left it in place for a year. The exposed film shows the tracks the sun made across the sky -

Latitude matters! In the top row, the one on the left is taken in Alaska, and beside it is a solargraph from Quito, Ecuador -

 The one of Stonehenge is rather miraculous -

Mark making - two afternoons at Morley

"Mark making for ceramics" was the title of the course. Tutor Jo asked us to follow her instructions about using the materials and the book of papers that she'd supplied. I'm always glad when the world of infinite possibilities gets limited somehow, whether by materials or subject matter or instructions.

First we used hard and soft pencils, and graphite and eraser, to draw lines across the pages. Simple and satisfying, right up my (travel-lines) street, in fact.

Noticing the feel, and the look, and what happens at the edge of the page...

White wax crayon and scratching and ink - been there, done that, but every time is different depending on what's gone before and what the purpose of doing it might be...

Scratching harder through wax into card - now we're getting somewhere...

 Landscapes emerge ...

 ...and all sorts of things happen when a tiny dot of ink is added to a big drop of water -

 Monoprinting - again, the type of mark that comes from different pencils -

 and from other items, surfaces and sticks for instance -

 or even by rolling a hexagonal pencil! -

Jo had also prepared some plaster blocks for carving into; these could be developed as stamps for clay -

 Using windows to find interesting areas - these are about 5cm square -

The eraser-carving is based on favourite marks -

The trees aren't abstract or simple but I have this thing about the way tree branches spread out, or not, and have never explored that idea.

The erasers turned out to be great for printing in grids.

In the second session I glued down some squares cut from the marks made last week, and we made 3d cylinders which gave an entirely different perspective to the marks/lines -

 Then we used a variety of scraps and put them between layers of acetate into slide holders. These are tiny pieces and it was a bit fiddly ...

 ... but when projected on the wall, what great effects!

cellophane and string

colour overlap

thin folded strips

scratching on the acetate