Embroidered pottery

I need a project for 2009 – slow cloth – something to pick up and put down with no pressure and no deadline.

This week I sorted through my old TAFE college notes from the ceramic certificate I completed in...1980 something...



I knew even as I dumped notes in the recycle bin that I would find a need for molecular formula (I can’t even believe I once knew how to do it!)
One of my potter friends keeps her notes just to prove to herself that she once had a brain.

Threads started running around my head..

Memories – digging pits for blackfiring – pulling glowing red hot pots from raku –

...building a bourry box kiln in the grounds of the college and sharing salt firings with the class mates who became my friends for the next 30 years (plates of food and a flagon or two set the tone for firings to come)

...staying up til 3am cursing the cone that took forever to bend.

...the excitement of cracking the door of a still hot kiln because I just couldn’t wait any longer for it to cool

...the oohs of a good firing and the aargh of a bad pot (always the one pot already spoken for)



...and I recalled saying as I stacked yet another kiln –
“If this was sewn it would be finished now, I don’t have to fire fabric!!”

and that is when IT came to me – I could embroider my pottery – well, not the *actual* pottery, images of it, not sure how but ideas are flowing and it WILL come together - (and who is to say NOT the *actual* pottery, who knows yet)

I’m going through my ceramic textbooks and sketching and photographing, and wondering about staining cloth with oxides (thought of this when I was rust dyeing but didn’t get around to testing it)

I think this will be a good year.

erotic vegetables

..there, I knew that would catch someone's attention....

Back at TAFE –
Our tutor for the term had been a trendy young potter who came from the ‘politically active - statement making’ atmosphere of an inner city art college to the wilds of an outer suburbs TAFE (I even recall at one stage describing us as ‘suburban’ which didn’t endear him to us, I can tell you!)

He came up with the project of slip casting an erotic vegetable....
WHA???!!!

Us ‘suburban’ mature age students had got all that nonsense out of our systems years ago, back with giving birth and breast feeding.

Despite recalling episodes of Black Adder where Baldrick found an interestingly shaped turnip, I decided I would be unable to recognize an erotic vegetable if it bit me on the ankle.

The butternut pumpkin was the most phallic shape I could find at the fruit market without being arrested, I was told I was taking it too literally but my very naïve mind remained blank, so I stayed with making a cast of my pumpkin, then altered a couple of them (before and after?...see...literal) and then (according to tutor) spoiled the whole thing by painting rather nice swirly patterns on them.

Don’t care, I failed erotica 101 but I still like my painted pumpkins

pit fired pottery

More of my pottery, I made the mould for these by filling balloons with plaster, then making a negative plaster mould of the shape created.
These were then slipcast with white earthenware slip.
The object was just to learn to create our own moulds so these sat around my workshop for a while because I wasn't sure how I wanted to finish them.

After I left technical college I went on a weekend away with a local arts group and we planned a pit firing.

We dug a huge hole in the ground, lay our pots in with wood, sawdust, handfuls of salt, oxides, anything else we thought would burn.
Set fire to it and covered the pit with sheets of corrugated iron, then sat back and listened to the dull bangs as pots exploded, we really didn't expect anything to survive, least of all my fine slipcast pieces, but it was the heavier pots that blew up, probably the thickness of the clay, luckily mine were not near them or I would have lost them from shrapnel.








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My pottery ..OR.. why can't I let go of old crafts?

Back in the 1980's, (seems a lifetime ago) I went to TAFE (Technical and Further Education College) and got my ceramic certificate. (The equivalent now is an associate diploma)

It was a lot of study and hard work, we built and fired fibre kilns and brick kilns and raku kilns, we wood fired, we salt glazed, we dug holes and pitfired, we tossed all kinds of chemicals and substances in our glazes and firings with gay abandon.
We studied glaze technology and learned Brogniarts formulae - me, who can't add without a calculator.

The course was supposed to be 4 years part time but we really put in 7 days a week and now I couldn't imagine devoting so much single minded energy and time.

After the course I set up a small studio at home and produced functional pottery for art shows and galleries for about ten years, interspersed with some teaching.

Sometime in the 90's the market began to be swamped with cheap asian imports, (which unfortunately for us, looked really good!) suddenly coffee cups didn't sell so well and I was pretty sick of them anyway.

I packed away the clay and glaze materials and 'lent' my studio to my daughter who was doing a BA in visual arts and needed a work space. While she was doing that I went back to TAFE and did a Needlecraft Certificate

I eventually got my studio back but not the dedication to stay up til 2am waiting for cone 10 to drop.

But I still can't make the break and part with my pottery tools (and I'm not talking about little wooden turning tools, I mean the big stuff, kick wheel, electric wheel, 14cu ft. gas kiln, pug mill, bags of dried clay that just need to be slaked)

Why do we hang on to our old craft goods like this? I know I'm not the only one who has these old reminders, it's bad feng shui, and bad clutter - do I think that now I'm twenty years older I'm suddenly going to want to start it all again.

Anyway, I thought I'd try some photographs of my pottery pieces that I kept, I only have a few photos of the old work and feel a need to make some kind of record for myself, so here is the first lot of photos.

This is one I'm quite fond of, about 23 cm tall, asymmetrical, salt glaze, I think (from memory) the blue was probably sprayed cobalt oxide.