Diabolical Clay

Hello and Welcome to Lucky Thirteen, the end of daylight saving edition of Sunday Ceramics.

Today I shall start with some housekeeping.

The idea of Sunday Ceramics was to have a place on the internet to fill the space left by Adriana’s Mud Colony blog. I have made some good clay friends through Mud Colony and with Adriana’s blessing I started the Sunday Ceramics Link up, so that we could continue to have a conversation about clay via our blogs and to also keep that sense of community going.

I don’t know about you, but I work in isolation and can often go for days and days without seeing anyone other than, The Spouse or the shop assistant at the IGA.

I like to see what people are doing in their studios, because it feeds my own creativity or reminds me of things that I had forgotten that I wanted to try or a glaze technique will send me off on an interesting tangent.

Sunday Ceramics was not set up as a space to just drop your link and run, there are some rules. One of the rules is to add a link in your blog post directing people here, so that they in turn can find the other blogs in the link up. That is how a link up works. It is a two way street.

The link is open all week and you can add your blog post anytime you like as long as you include a link back here to me, a comment would also be nice so that I get a notification that you have been here.

Now onto the clay.

I have been making rocks again, skulls and rocks. I have been slip casting cups as well, but it has mostly been free form work happening this week. I needed a new bird bath, so I made two large concave platters from reclaimed clay and I accidentally made a soft folded soap dish.

I was messing about with a slab and I wasn’t happy with the shape, so my mind wandered off onto a tangent and I folded the edges, thinking about making a hanging pot that I could thread some twine through.

I liked how the folded edges looked, so I discarded the idea of threading anything through the folds and compressed the edges together. This has ended up turning into a lovely soft shape that I am quite taken with.

I was told once, that you first need to know the rules before you can break them properly.

I am making a totem. These pieces are about the size of half a house brick and I will work up to some larger pieces for the base that will be about the size of a basketball.

I have just poked a hole through a ball of BRT clay with a piece of broom handle. I have added bits of LGH white stoneware to see what happens. I might also paint on some porcelain slip in parts as well.

More skulls, the unglazed BRT is growing on me, though I still dislike the iron spots, but for outside pieces that I can mostly ignore, they work well enough against the bricks.

The drunken whisky tourists have been posting lots of photos on their trek from distillery to distillery. This is a topiary shark they photographed in Railton and now I am thinking of making a shark’s jaw, to place in a shrubbery somewhere.

That is me for the week.

As always,

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Dear Croc Diary, it is Day 42 and whilst I have forgotten about the oddness of wearing odd crocs, strangers in shopping centres are still giving me side glances.

Dear Nail Polish Diary, it has now been two months since I found the shelf of colourful polish on special in the supermarket and I have not stopped smiling since.

Dear Internet, I am slowly replacing all my black clothes with purples and reds and blues. I have a rainbow patchwork skirt and new pirate socks and I really think the decision to wear red and blue crocs everywhere has been a good one.

A few months after my mum died, I was talking with a friend who was a few years further along in her grief, and she told me about the slow return of colour in her life. At the time I could not even think about colour, let alone want to wear anything bright. My only concession to colour in those dark months, was a pair of rainbow socks and a purple knitted hat that Mum had bought me before she died.

It will be Mum’s birthday in seven days, and this April is not as hard as previous Aprils.

It has taken me five years internet, but I have returned to colour.

Dear Grandparents Diary, I have been encouraging my grandchildren to draw on themselves with coloured textas.

Amy drew this, it is a portrait of me wearing my presidential crown.

Isaac wanted a monster and so I drew this one for him.

Here Evelyn is putting the finishing touches onto my love heart.

Enough with the diaries as I can’t think of a Dear Diary title for these next bits.

Time got away from the travelling cartoonists on The Greatest Whisky Tour Ever and they didn’t manage to make it up here to decorate their Commemorative Whisky Tumblers. So being a good friend and all round kind person, I did it for them. I thought the duck was a very nice touch.

I have a window behind my computer screen and there is an Elder tree outside the window. I spend a lot of time doing ninja style creepings about looking for my camera and trying not to frighten the birds away. I bought a little point and shoot, so that I could just point and shoot and I am rather happy with the photos it takes.

Our cruelty to Asylum seekers continues on, with both major political parties competing to see who can be the biggest Asshat. I think the LNP are winning in the Asshattery stakes but Labor are trying their hardest to reclaim the title.

Here is a by cartoon Alan Moir that is doing the rounds on facebook

And a photo from the recent Australia wide March in March protests.

That is me for the day, Thank you for reading.

This week has been a busy week in the studio compared to last week when I did not have the time to make anything.

I have been preparing some cups for a couple of possibly drunken cartoonists to decorate while they are on their whisky tour, you can follow the progress of the intrepid whisky tourists here on their facebook page.

Here are the slipcast cups fresh out of the mould.

And here they are all tidied up.

My daughter Veronica has been making soap and we both find that the process is endlessly fascinating. I am soon to become Veronica’s beta soap tester and I needed a long soap dish that is capable of holding about ten bars of soap. I had an idea in my head of what I wanted and I was pleased to discover the finished soap dish ended up looking very similar to the picture I had of it in my head. That rarely happens as the clay and I usually go off on a giant long tangent together and finish up miles away from the original concept.

Pinterest, Oh My word, what a giant time suck that place is, so many beautiful pots, so little time. I have  been looking for easy projects for the children (and possibly the adults) to make at Clay Club. I typed in ceramic animals into the search bar and in a blink of an eye I lost two hours pinning all the things. Here is a link to my Pinterest account if you want to follow me. I created a board which I named ideas for Clay Club and I will post some of the ideas I find onto my Kim Foale Ceramics FB page so that it can be used as a resource for those days when none of us know what we want to make at all.

I finally added my entry to the Australian Ceramics Directory on the Australian Ceramics Association website and received a nice compliment when it was noted that my southern ice porcelain tampons didn’t look like they were ceramic.

I think that is me for the week, I am off to clay club today, which due to popular demand has been extended to two classes on a Sunday instead of the single class, so Yay for muddy fun on a weekend.

A note about the link, Can you PLEASE remember if you are joining in, to add a link back to Sunday Ceramics in the post that you link here with.

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Good Morning Mudslingers, it has started to chill down a bit here and as I type this with cold fingers, I think that t-shirt only mornings are now a thing of the past.

I haven’t actually been in the studio to make any work of substance this week, as my timetable has been full of meetings and admin to do with the Australian Ceramics Triennale 2018 which the Tasmanian Ceramics Association are hosting here in Hobart in four years time. I try and keep my online lives very separate but sometimes I wear all three hats at once and today looks like it is going to be one of those days.

Yesterday we had a fabulous day at the TCA studio in Glenorchy with a making day in preparation for a pit and raku firings later on in the year. Out of sixteen participants in our day of muddy fun, there were six new faces which is fabulous. The Tasmanian Ceramics Association is in a transitional phase at the moment, as older members retire from a ceramic life and new people are discovering the medium of clay for the first time. It is a lovely time to be involved with the association as the possibilities of world domination via clay are just endlessly wonderful.

I will have photos of the clay day once a friend emails them to me, then I will post them up onto the TCA website and link back here.

I am trying to make some ocarinas. A friend loaned me her Ocarina and so using it as a guide I set about making some of my own. I left the ocarinas to harden to leather hard so that I could make the musical holes without ruining the shape and forgot about them. Now they are too dry to work with and so back to square one I go. I have since googled a tutorial or two on Ocarinas and I am looking forward to making some more today, or maybe tomorrow. With this image you get the gist of what I am trying to do.

I have been S.L.O.W.L.Y so so slowly, uploading more images of the work I have for sale to my ceramic shop. It is a process, but with my daughter Veronica “vigorously encouraging” me, I am actually writing descriptions about the work rather than just saying cup or spoon. I really think that as Veronica is the WRITER in the family I should employ her to write all the flowery descriptions for me and I could then pay her in pots.

I like this quote. I think it is true. I live inside my head and will forget to eat proper meals, happily existing on toasted cheese sandwiches or dumpling soup and whatever fruit is in the fruit bowl. As soon as I have left a room I have forgotten whatever I was doing in that room and it is not uncommon for me to come back and be surprised by the half finished job I had wandered away from. Case in point is the Ocarinas, I had totally forgotten about them, until I saw them all dry and lonely on the table. The Spouse gets very frustrated with my strong chaos gene, but he is finally realising after 27 years together that I am not really here at all, I am elsewhere in my head.

Here is the link up, can you please remember to add a link back to me in your ceramic post.

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I do not really feel much like writing anything happy and clay related today, we had an election here in Tasmania yesterday and the people voted overwhelmingly for a conservative right wing government. This does not bode well for those of us concerned about the state of the environment, those of us with a larger vision that does not involve chopping everything down and ripping everything up. Long live our corporate overlords or some such nonsense was the subtext in the lead up to the election and now we shall frack all the things. The people have spoken.

SIGH, So I shall distract myself with the work and try not to think about all the things.

Look, seabirds. The clearly defined bird is the first bird I made at a workshop with the lovely and talented Eve Howard and the smaller two are experimental birds.

I found a rock that looked like a dinosaurs head.

There have been some interesting ceramic conversations happening over on the Virtual Clay Facebook event page the description of the event is as follows,

Join the conversation!

This is a chance for you to get involved in an NCECA panel whether you’ll be in Milwaukee or not. Virtual Realities, Material World is a panel addressing the role of social media in the professional lives of four ceramic artists. This March join Michael Kline, Ben Carter, Adam Field and Carole Epp in person or through social media in the conversation. Use #virtualclay on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to pose questions, share ideas, build community. We will be collecting your questions from now until Friday March 21st

Also I am in the process of setting up a ceramic shop. Yay me. I will have a proper launch soon but for now it is still in the early tweaking stages and you can have a sneak preview of my ceramic shop here. Your feedback is appreciated.

That is all from me for today, I am off to teach at Clay Club this morning and then going for a bit of a subdued March in March in Hobart.

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Hello and Welcome to the ninth edition of Sunday Ceramics.

This is “Epiphany the Elephant” I have probably  talked about Epiphany here before and so if you know her story, just skip along to the next set of photos.

I teach a mixed class of children and adults that has evolved into Clay Club. At the end of each clay club I generally ask what the children would like to make the in the next session. My most prolific student very seriously told me that she would like to make a desert full of jungle animals.

A few days before clay club I thought I had best try my hand at making a couple of jungle animals so that I could keep up the illusion that I knew a thing or two about clay, and much to my surprise, the elephant turned out rather well. I was even more surprised with how much I enjoyed making it. At the same time as the elephant was drying out, an internet friend of mine, Lauren, who had suffered a devastating personal tragedy that is much commented on in darker corners of the web, opened up her facebook page with a thread, titled “The Elephant in the Room” Her bravery, grace and honesty, humbled and honoured me as I was named a mentor and giver of sage advice in the thread.

In the same week I was visited by another sweet friend, who accidentally broke one of Epiphany’s tusks off as she was drying out. My poor friend Carol, was devastated by the broken tusk and try as I might I could not convince her that the break was unimportant.

Is still unimportant.

As the fact that I had made the elephant was much more important than whether the elephant survived or not. Epiphany the elephant was a catalyst for a rather critical realisation, that I can make things purely for fun, that I do not need to have context, or a point of reference. This was quite a big leap for me to make in my head as sometimes my Aspie brain makes me think along ever narrower straight lines.

As potters we understand the transience of the objects we make, the all or nothing toss of the die as we fire our kilns, the knowledge that disaster is possibly just around the corner and the relief when we finally crack the kilns for a quick peek, that everything has worked as it should.

The breaking of the tusk was a gift and an integral part of the journey that Ephinany and I are on together. Trying to make Carol feel better I dabbed a tiny bit of red underglaze on the break and made some flippant comment about poaching, that made Carol groan again.

Once Epiphany had survived the bisque, the red underglaze on the tusk was like a beacon telling me that more colour was needed. I had been thinking about Lauren quite a bit, so I gave Epiphany rainbow socks and a trunk warmer in her honour and also because I think an elephant in Tasmania would be a bit chilly. I wrote a blog post later that week about Elephants in Rooms and didn’t think much more about anything until a few months later.

When this happened.

A ceramic gift from my friend Dawn Oakford, “The Angel of Jumbos in Socks” I do not think I have the words to explain how happy this angel makes me.

From one small elephant comes so much joy.

I had more photos and things to share but I think that is quite enough words for one morning.

If you would like to join in with this weeks Sunday Ceramics

JUST

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Also a comment would be nice, so I get two notifications to follow you back to your blog to have a sticky at what you have been up to.

I first wrote about the Protest Tampons here on the blog on the 16th of January in a post titled Stop The Tampons.

Refugee advocacy groups have been telling us, the general public, that refugee women do not have free and easy access to sanitary products, to nappies for their babies, that toilet paper and water is rationed. This message has been slow to filter out into the mainstream. RISE first raised this matter in 2011. Advocacy groups have been telling us of the inhumane treatment of refugees and we are not listening. This article published in the Green Left  titled, “Life in Detention a Daily Shame” Shames me. Locking up refugees has now become big business and there is a lot of money to be made in cruelty.

The Minister for Immigration, Scott Morrison responded to Destroy the Joint’s call for women to protest the Goverment’s cruel asylum policy, with assurances that of course refugee women have all the tampons they will ever want, buckets of tampons, free tampons,

There’s open access and continued access on demand, female welfare officers, all of those sorts of things…”

I don’t know about you but when a government minister assures me that things are OKAY whilst rigidly controlling the information flow to the media, I start to worry that maybe things are not as okay as we are led to believe.

I have finished making my Protest Tampons and The Spouse made me a barbed wire bowl to hold them.

Now that I have finished the work, I don’t actually have any idea what to do with them, other than some vague ideas of plonking them in a window somewhere in town so that people can see them. I was going to send them to the Ministers office but I decided that was a sure fire way to bury them forever.

I am sure with your help internet, we will have a bright idea and the Protest Tampons will find a new home.

I also hope with all my heart that the refugees will also find a new home, here in Australia with all the rest of us who are descended from boat people.

Hello Mudslingers and general populace of the internet, I am home safe and well from my interstate jaunt. Melbourne was its usual glorious self, Ballan was sweet, St Andrews market was lovely and Warrandyte was fun. From my trip away I have learned that I am not a market person as watching Truly Southurst set up and take down her market stall was a bit of an eye opener. All that packing and unpacking every weekend would do my head in and I would end up giving all my work away to avoid carrying it home again.

I salute you brave marketeers.

I haven’t done much this week as I am on the downward side of a making cycle and the studio is full of work fresh from the kiln that all needs to have their bottoms sanded.

I was walking down my driveway swinging a string of skulls to and fro, when a driver of a passing ute goggled his eyes at me and I realised it looked like I was walking down the driveway swinging a dead snake.  Ha. My Legend is growing by the minute.

I lay the skulls down in the gravel and took a photo. Then I channelled Johnny Cash for the rest of the afternoon humming, “Don’t take your skulls to town son, leave your skulls at home.”

This morning I am off very soon to host Clay Club at the Tasmanian Ceramics Associations studio in Glenorchy. It looks like I will have a full house with four children and three adults all busily playing in the mud making glorious creations.

I am sorry about the broken link thing last week, it was working perfectly when I pre-wrote the post and saved it in drafts but somewhere between saving and pressing publish, the code vanished. pffft  just like that.

I will cross everything that the link works today and I shall come and visit your blogs this afternoon when I get home from Clay Club.

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The Absentee issue.

Hello Everyone, I am not home, I am not here, I am away in glorious Melbourne having ceramic adventures. Or at least I hope I am as I am writing this on the day before I fly out, so I am sort of time travelling via the magic of the internet as I pretend that it is Sunday when it is still only Wednesday but is really Sunday.

Confused?

Here have some spoons. This is what the spoons look like after the magic of firing. The blue is so pretty.

The firing was a good one and there were some treasures to be found.

The large bird on the right is the same bird that is in the Sunday Ceramics image. I hand built the bird using BRT clay (Feeney’s Buff Raku Trachyte) which is a gloriously robust clay that can be fired from 1000-1300 degrees. After I had finished making the bird I covered it thickly with Southern Ice Porcelain slip to see what would happen. You can see how it looks after a bisque in the Sunday Ceramics photo above. I then glazed it with a clear gloss glaze (RL*) and tadaa, quite a nice result. The small bird to the left is also made using BRT and I glazed it with a matt glaze (MM**) and I am super pleased with how they both turned out.

*RL Ruth Langman named after the artist who formulated it. This glaze is quite forgiving if you are a slapdash glazer like I am and it feels lovely in your hand once it has matured. I have fired it from 1240 – 1300 with no problems at all. Though it will craze a bit if it is too thick (ie: triple dipped)
Silica==31
Kaolin ==10
Nephelyne Syenite == 30
Gerstley Borate ==21
Wollastonite ==8

**MM Mellow Matt. This glaze was given to me as a student by Ben Richardson and I have a love hate relationship with this glaze, at the mopment I am in love with it as it seems to like being fired at cone 9 the best and I am getting some lovely satiny results in my test tiles. And the small bird is just gorgeous. Because of the amount of Kaolin in this glaze it isn’t really suitable for slipcast cups as it is just too thick for the bisqued slipware to cope with.

Potash Feldspar== 50
Whiting== 25
Kaolin== 25
Rutile flour== 3

And that is me for today, I am (hopefully) at Warrandyte and I am either swanning about the place networking like mad wearing my Presidential Hat OR I am having trouble swallowing my anxiety down and I am looking at pots and not wanting to interrupt the potters who I really want to talk with.

It could go either way.

Having some technical difficulties with the Mr Linky as I’m in Victoria. Leave your link in the comments until I can get home and wave my magic wand at things.

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