Getting clay books ready for the book fair

The porcelain "pages"  are ready for lacing together - these are thin enough to let daylight through -

This one is thicker, and needs to have a strong light source behind it to show the detail "inside" -

The multi-page books are quite opaque -

As for the "maze" books, dipped in slip - these are rather fragile and transport (by train) is difficult. I'm making a box for each one, and a "nest" inside the box. And the boxes will be carefully packed within another box.

(This post is linked to Off the Wall Fridays.)

Textiles into ceramics - what came out of the kiln

At the last session of the textiles-into-ceramics class, some items were glazed and needed firing, and some had been dipped into porcelain slip and needed firing. Now they've been fired, and collected ... and here they are.

looking very fragile in the sand tray

some of it survived, and you can see the stitching

before dipping in porcelain slip (next time, use thicker slip?)

These are "clay books" in the sense that they're folded from one sheet of paper. Either string or skewers was used to keep them from flopping when dipped into the slip -

the dark marks are from screen-printing the paper with  black slip before
painting the folded form with porcelain slip

another close-up - showing the string

thicker string was used on this one

the skewers - as well as the paper - have burnt away

The porcelain books - much more solid, and about 3" (8cm) high - some with glazed "covers", all with unique numbers -

"velvet black" glaze, fired to stoneware

This book is about 15cm (6") high and is quite solid - pages have been patterned with stitched fabrics -

Many of these will be going (at some risk!) to the book fair on 15 March.

I hope to make more of the folded forms sometime.

Clay books at the V&A

Wandering in the beautiful, peaceful Ceramics galleries… and finding work by Sara Radstone -

and Halim al Karim  (whose BA was in ceramics (1988) but who now works with photography) -

Two sorts of "ghosts" in clay. Unreadable books … stripped of access to their contents -  the title doesn't fit with my understanding of what a ghost is; but what might it be?  From wikipedia: "the soul or spirit of a dead person or animal that can appear, in visible form or other manifestation, to the living"; they etymology also relates to "spiritus" in the sense of a breath or blast. "The modern noun does, however, retain a wider field of application, extending on one hand to "soul", "spirit", "vital principle", "mind" or "psyche", the seat of feeling, thought and moral judgement; on the other hand used figuratively of any shadowy outline, fuzzy or unsubstantial image, in optics, photography and cinematography especially a flare, secondary image or spurious signal."

Metaphorically, Nietszche's usage can enlighten us: he "argued that people generally wear prudent masks in company; but that an alternative strategy for social interaction is to present oneself as an absence, as a social ghost". An absence … a ghost can also be used in the sense of an impression of the past.

Textiles into ceramics: exploring surfaces, day 1

The course runs all day Sunday for four weeks at City Lit. It's good to be back in the pottery room - here are some still-lifes of tools -

Some pecial stamps, including patterned rollers -

 I'd like to make some more of the clay books, and experiment with clay pages. These are made in paper clay and will be light, in contrast to the heaviness of clay -

 The pages are patterned by rolling them between layers of fabric -

 The paper clay output. My plan is to stitch wire into the holes at the sides of the pages once they've been fired -

 In the afternoon I used porcelain to make the same objects -

At the end of the day I was definitely feeling tired - but it had passed in a flash. Looking forward to next week and trying not to think about it too much in between times.

Off to Turn the Page

I'm heading off today to the Norwich book fair, at the Forum Friday and Saturday. If you're in the neighbourhood, do drop by!

Here are photos from last year -

It's a great space and should be a really interesting event.

As well as the "binders keepers" (of which you've probably heard enough, on this blog) I'm taking some clay books - 

and the memory balls (of which you've also heard and seen enough!).

Ceramics - last weeks

Last week, what came out of the kiln was my experiments with on-glaze enamels. They were mixed too thinly and mostly didn't work, but these two turned out ok -

I had lots of bisque-fired clay books to glaze, and used just transparent glazes, a matte and a shiny. Keeping track of what went where got confusing, but I have a photographic record -

This is what went into the kiln last week -

and this is some of what came out - white clay, bisque fired -

There isn't time for glazing, but I like it just the way it is. It'll get a coat of diluted pva to seal the surface. And I made some more, to be collected later -

My accumulated work this term -

That shark-like thing on the left uses a tile that split in firing (to be glued together with Araldite, but not the fast-drying variety). A close-up -

and a glimpse of the exciting things other people were doing with printing and glazing -

I'm excited about the fat white books, with their unique sequences of numbers that look like the windows of a building ... as though a book might be somewhere to live. People gave me wonderful suggestions and ideas - how the white books look as though they were glued together by being soaked with water (which reminded me of the Flood Library project) - and also how they needed tiny wire people scattered among them, or climbing ladders (which got me thinking about stop-motion animation). So rather than feeling sad at the end of a very enjoyable course, I feel excited by these new possibilities.

Ceramics, week 5 (or 6?)

On Monday the first of my "clay books" came out of the kiln -

 The oxides painted on paper didn't transfer very strongly -

 but the monoprints (pigment mixed into glycerine) worked well -

More of the same this week; I stamped both sides, and covered both sides of some of the "books" with slip. This is what has gone to the kiln -

A closeup (love that number stamp) -

Also, the realisation that the clay has a drying effect on the fingers. Next morning, perhaps "helped" by the two days of handstitch and some stubborn stitches, the tip of my thumb was split ... it's taking a long time to heal.

Clay pages

Last week's experiments with glaze are out of the kiln - nothing exciting, but "we aren't finished with them yet" - 

This week it was back to various ways of printing - slip printed through a prepared screen on the left, and pigment mixed with glycerine rolled out for monoprinting on the right -

I tried a bit of the monoprinting, onto newspaper, and then laying it onto wet slip so that the colour would transfer, and also used some of last week's sponge prints with underglaze colours onto paper - the paper will burn off in the kiln and leave the colour, cobalt blue -

Sgrafito offers another kind of decoration.

The clay tiles are folded to make clay "books". Before painting on the slip, I textured the back in various ways -

I'll be happy to make dozens of these in the next few weeks. Every one different ....