Over the summer I’ve been covering Geoff as the ceramics technician for 2 days per week over the 6 weeks. It’s been great being able to spend time in ceramics, I wouldn’t have been able to do it with the summer holidays and having my kids to look after so for me to get this opportunity has been great!

Whilst I’ve had longer days to be here (my kids have stayed with my parents) and not having to be on a time limit I’ve tried to get in the mindset of how I was in Kecskemet where I was able to just ‘play’ with the clay. It was in Kecskemet that I first started playing with thrown forms so I wanted to try some more. I decided to use a kiln shelf to place the arrangement on so I found a shelf that would fit the whole width of the large kiln in order for me to make a larger piece of work.

This was the first piece I made. I like the smoothness of each piece however the overall form was not what I was planning as I had intended for this to be wall art. This piece seems to come out/up too far however it would be ok to be a table piece.

Using my winter sketch books I looked for lines and shapes to layout a shape for me to work with when making a group thrown piece. The shape that came to me was this as each corner was going off into the distance.

I threw the piece to intentionally have have larger pieces in the middle getting smaller to the edges as I felt that it gives the piece more balance.

As you can tell from the above image I had a slight problem! As the piece dried it shrunk and pulled apart from each other. I tried to keep my eye on it and push the pieces back together as it was drying but as you can see it didn’t fully work. I will still glaze the piece (when I’ve got my glazed sorted) and hope that the glaze fixes the pieces back together.

I’ve been trying to think of a solution to this problem. One solution could be to place the pieces onto paper towels and as the clay drys and shrinks the paper towel will move with the clay instead of the clay being stuck to the shelf. Another solution could be to push and squish the clay together more, this would deform the round shape which it not exactly what I want but it could solve the problem. Another way could be to throw individual little pieces and then score and slip them together, a process that I really don’t want to do as it takes the fun out of the process. I’ll try the other ways first and hope that they work.