Ceramics, week 3

Bisque fired pieces from last week - the white clay suddenly looks white; the combination looks rather like streaky bacon at this stage -So much went on in the class, we were feeling overwhelmed - too many possibilities (again).

First - slabs. Using combinations of clays, in slices, and recombining those to get "an ikat effect" -
The pattern on the right is very thin - it stuck to the cardboard so the rest had to be cut off with a wire. You'll see the thin stuff again later.

One of the things you can do with slabs is to use stencils - you can just about see the circles of paper on the large piece of clay. It's been dabbed with black slip - leaving some raw clay showing between the sponge marks - and the paper will burn off during firing. The small pce of clay has been covered in slip, then scored through, resulting in sgrafito -
and then it was slapped down onto the clay on the cardboard, which had now dried and cracked. The slip grabbed the clay -
At this point you can add an underglaze colour, which will sit in the cracks.

Various ways of printing clay (with slip, ie a solution of coloured clay) - stamping with stamps cut from foam; silkscreening, with "ordinary" screens, or with scrim as here, which has had squiggles of pva glue applied and left to dry. You can "blot" the glue onto fabric, then sprinkle sand on - and use that for relief printing onto clay.
Here's the result of printing with the patterned scrim -
And here's some of the "blotted" pva - it came off the greaseproof paper but will burn away in firing. That slab was first relief-printed with a block, and now is getting various colours of slip painted on -
An exciting possibility is to screen print slip onto the inside of a cardboard box which has been opened out. You need to add Universal Medium to the slip. The box can then be re-closed and fired - it will burn away, leaving the printed slip/clay in the form of a hollow box.

Joining slabs - fewest joins are necessary when bending the slab round a tube (loosely wrapped with newspaper), cutting the overlaid edges at an angle, scoring the cut surfaces, adding slip, pressing together. Other slab joins use the same basic principle -
The straight edge is used to scrape and tidy the surface of the cylinder -
At the end of the day I felt I'd only just got started -
Homework is to go see the show that's just opened at the Estorick Collection - Italy's ceramic revival.