Porcelain hand built sketch.

Encounter. (Feb.09) 170x140x50 mm. Hand built porcelain piece. I have not hand built with porcelain for about 13 years. I decided to make work whilst teaching ceramic practice to the second years. They had to explore plasticity and rigidity; a project brief, introducing them to hand building. Working with slabs and modeling organic and related material, they had to create a piece that demonstrated the diverse properties of clay. Appropriate surfaces had to be developed (mainly textures) to compliment the two contrasting themes. I took the images of the piece, with my cell phone, when it came out of the kiln this morning. I gave a talk at Ceramics SA's AGM. Everyone there enjoyed the work, I therefore decided to post it on my blog. Below is a detail of the fish perturbed by the impending doom on the surface - a Hokusai inspired Wave's encounter with a shark. The same wave appears in two dimensions (ballpoint pen drawing) as a decal / transfer on the paper boats in the to be continued post below.


















Encounter (Detail)

To be continued!

The ships sail on and on, (1999) Private collection.
Hand built paper clay constructed origami boats fired to 1186 degrees with decals of my ballpoint pen drawings. I will be experimenting with colour transfers (colour ballpoint pen drawings) on porcelain shortly. The series of origami inspired ceramic statements will included water bombs & other related forms and shapes suitable to the evocative nature of literary sources to be investigated.