Diabolical Clay

Hello everyone we had a lovely long rumbly thunderstorm yesterday and I decided to trust to the universe and fire the electric kiln in the middle of a storm; Because deadlines. Luckily for me the power did not go out at all and the kiln fired without any hiccups.

I noticed that the last time I fired the kiln to bisque, cone 07 was barely tipping so that means the kiln only hit about 973 C instead of 1000 C. For the non-potters, cones are those little pointy things you can see in the photo below. They are designed to melt at very specific temperature and as kilns often have cool spots, similar to a kitchen oven, cones are placed in the bottom, middle and top of the kiln to measure the temperature differences.

I did the tongue test on the ware as I unpacked the bisque and the work had been fired well enough but the disparity in the temperature from what the cones are saying to what the temperature gauge says is a bit of a worry.

So in this glost firing I have put cones everywhere to see what is going on inside the kiln.

I am heading off to Melbourne on Thursday for a ceramic adventure. There is an exhibition I want to see at Mossgreen gallery

And then afterwards I am going to visit the Melaleuca Ceramic and Art studio, which just looks fabulous. It should be a lovely day.

Friday I am going to absorb some more of Melbourne’s fabulous energy, it really is my favourite city and then I get to CATCH A TRAIN. Yes it is worthy of all caps locks because I adore trains, I once caught a train from Melbourne to Adelaide just for the adventure of the journey, though the adventure palls after eleven hours of sitting down.

So yes a train to Ballan to see my friend Truly, to check out her super tidy studio and then to head off to St Andrews Markets on the Saturday, where I will be flogging off some of my work rather cheaply.

I have been preparing spoons, especially for this mainland jaunt. The red of the iron wash will fade to a sandstoney colour and the white will change to a deep shiny blue. Because magic, because alchemy, because of the transformative powers of high temperatures on silica and other stuff.

I might have some other bits and pieces with me, like skull beads.

But I will be travelling light and so I am not going to bring a lot of work with me to sell, as the point of this trip is to do a bit of networking at Warrandyte on the Sunday. Where I will magically transform from Kim the ordinary everyday mudslinger to Kim the President of the Tasmanian Ceramics Association (da da da dunnn) Hopefully I will be able to hatch some Trans Tasman plots for world domination via mud.

Or I will just buy lots of ceramics from all the gorgeous potters that are going to be on the banks of the Warrandyte River.

Now I am off out the door to go and teach at the first Clay Club of 2014. There are still a couple of places left for either an adult or a child in this no pressure handbuilding just for FUN class. Clay Club is held every second Sunday at 10 am in the Tasmanian Ceramics Association’s studio in a old classroom in G block at Cosgrove high school in Glenorchy. It is heaps of fun and the children extend my artistic practice is ways I never dreamed possible.

If you would like to join in just,

Add your name and URL to the Mr Linky below.

Using the “Sunday Ceramics” title and photo I provided is OPTIONAL it is up to you.

Then PLEASE

Link back here to me.

Hello everyone, I think that I might be in danger of melting today it is a muggy 30 degrees already and it is only 9 am *sigh*

In the ceramic studio this week I am preparing for a glost firing and for the last two days I have been busily underglazing.

I started with the Southern Ice Porcelain Protest Tampons and wrote 38 words on 50 tampons in bright red underglaze.

Shelter. Haven. Welcome. Kindness. Due-process. Asylum x3. Justice. Unity. Decency. Dignity x2. Peace. Honesty. Grace. Care. Faith. Integrity. Truth x2. Empathy. Trust. Love x2. Compassion. Hope x4. Honour. Equality. Refuge. Fairness. Freedom. Mercy. Immunity. Shame. Tolerance. Heart. Charity. Sorrow. Respect x3.Safety. Eternity. Life x3.

My fingers are ITCHING to throw these spoons into my bucket of iron wash (Red Iron Oxide 60. Rutile 20. Nepheline Syenite 20.) But I am being disciplined, very very disciplined and doing all the colourful things first because I make a big mess playing with iron.

So I decorated some houses.

And decorated some cups.

I painted some roses that are “supposed” to be going on the rim of a ceremonial cake plate and then had a LIGHTBULB moment after I saw how pretty they looked in a little blue bowl.

My seabirds have started to change from clearly defined birds to more rocklike forms and I will be interested to see where these birds end up.

As the tidy gene completely missed me and its friend the chaos gene is well established I took photos of my tidy work space to show Molly (my minion, who is off gallivanting) that my studio was actually tidy for a few fleeting moments.

And that has been my week in the studio this week.

If you would like to join in please

Add your name and URL to the Mr Linky below.

Using the “Sunday Ceramics” title and photo I provided is OPTIONAL it is up to you.

Link back here to me.

and tadaa back to work I go.

The birthday edition YAY, happy birthday to me. I will be breaking my sugar fast later on today and eating cake.

Good Morning Mud Slingers, how are you today? What have you been doing in your studios this week? Have you been plastering stuff all over the interwebs and have you worried that it will get pinched? Have you had whole pages of your blog, images included “scraped” and published onto a fake blog somewhere? Have you come across the darker side of the internet and been saddened that it isn’t all kittens and conversations?

Well you are not alone, this too has happened to me.

I first started Frogpondsrock back in 2007, the early posts of mine are terrible, full of ellipses and woeful sentence structure, but they tell a story so I leave them there and just ignore their existence.

I learned very early on that “scraping” was common. Advertising sites hosted offshore somewhere, would steal whole pages of content, images included, and bang them up onto their website. Some linked back to me, some didn’t but it was my words and images up there next to the virus laden flashing download now graphics.

At first it is a shock, I mean really, how rude. But basically there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. I could waste time and energy tracking down their host and demanding a takedown that would probably not happen anyway and who has the energy for that? I certainly don’t.

So I chose to ignore the thieves of the internet and counted myself thankful that some of them linked back to my blog.

But because I choose to ignore the practice does not mean that I make it worthwhile for people to steal my stuff. I resize my images so that they look fabulous here on FPR but are next to useless if they are printed out.

I like large images, so I resize my images to 800 px on the longest side but really, 600 is plenty good enough for a blog post. You need to balance out the fact that you want people to look at your work, with making the image useless on paper.

I also do not waste time watermarking my images because I don’t like watermarks, they make a photo look messy and cluttered and distract my eye. Also watermarks are really easy to remove so to my mind that is a double waste of my time.

If you do not have a photo programme, Picasa is a good free one and I am sure there are many others. Ask your friends what they use, I use photoshop. Macs come with iPhoto already installed and so you don’t even have to do anything there at all.

A selection of the images I use on the blog are photos that I have shared on instagram first. Instagram automatically resizes the image to 640 x 640 and that makes it a nearly perfect size for a blog post. ( though it is too square for my aesthetic I like a landscape orientation)

This image was a quick snap for my records, taken with my camera and I resized it to 800 on the longest side. Normally I would then resize this again within the blog post so that it was easily viewable on any device but still large enough for a good look at the work if you click on the photo and open it up in a new window.

This next image is the same but resized to 600px

and this one is 400

600 is probably the best size to use as the image is small enough to be useless offline, it is small enough so that your blog loads quickly as large images really slow down the load time, but it is still large enough for people to view easily.

I hope that has helped a little bit but the rule of thumb that I follow in my online life is, if I put it onto the web I expect it to get pinched. I also work by the rule of not saying anything online that I wouldn’t want published on a billboard outside my place of work and as I work at home I do not want a billboard across the road flashing obscenities at me, unless I am really grumpy when in that case I will probably just nod at the billboard and say, “Kimmy you are a poet”.

Here is the image again, just how I like it best here.

The work featured in the photos is a woodfired platter by Lise Edwards, porcelain cups, rocks and bowl by Kim Foale, road kill quoll by Eve Howard and bird plate by Adriana Christianson.

 
Just add your name and URL to the Mr Linky below.

Link back here to me.

Some time last winter these ants came inside in a barrow load of firewood.I was careful not to burn any as I am in the habit of examining each piece of wood before I load the fire, as often frogs, spiders and lizards hide inside the wood. I am sorry enough about destroying their homes without burning them alive as well.

They are not bitey ants and so I just ignored them. I would often see them cruising along the edge of the kitchen bench and I idly wondered what they were living on or if they were slowly starving to death in the back of the woodbox. There are certainly enough crumbs on my floor to keep them alive if ants eat crumbs. The dogs water bowl sits conveniently in a corner of the kitchen so there is water as well, but in the scheme of things I didn’t think too deeply about the ants other than being careful not to squash them.

Last week David was home and he discovered that the ants were living in my sugar bowl and now I am thinking about the ants a lot.

For the record ants are tricky to photograph, as soon as I take the lid off the sugar bowl they PANIC. And it is a mad scramble to RUN AWAY RUN AWAY

Poor homeless ants, forced to live in temporary accomodation on top of a microwave. I don’t know enough about these ants to know what to do. I assume they are in the sugar bowl because it is wooden and dark and rarely gets disturbed.

Do I just leave the ants alone, which is what I have been doing? Or do I go and let them go on a likely looking tree? I need an ant expert to say, Oh these are XX ants and they live on sugar sap from XX tree and then I can relocate them.

These sorts of things happen to me all the time internet and I am a bit concerned that my homeless ants are slowly starving to death.

Sometimes I just have to over-expose and highlight the hell out of an image to get the effect I want.

These are my rainbow fingernails, the colour selection totally inspired by my seven year old grand daughter Amy.

I started to hum the rainbow song in the supermarket yesterday as a display of heavily discounted nail polish caught my eye. The Spouse assumed I was buying the nail polish for Amy and barely rolled his eyes at me when I told him they were actually for me.

It is very hard to photograph your own fingernails so you will have to take my word for the fact that they look pretty good.

Much easier to photograph my new crocs. My birthday crocs I bought for my birthday *whispers it is on the 2nd*

Do you remember Klout, that flash in the pan measure of a bloggers influence?

At the height of the Klout mania, when brands were judging bloggers by their Klout scores, I manipulated my topics of influence so that I was seen to be a thought leader on zombies and crocs.  Brands and their PRs could take comfort in the fact that come the apocalypse, they would be safe with Frog Ponds Rock.

I like my crocs, I particularly like the fact that me wearing crocs annoys the hell out of some people, so when it came time to retire my favourite purple flowery crocs, my intrepid snow crocs. I decided to go with a colourful pair that makes me smile.

I am smiling now as I look down at my happy feet.

Speaking of happy.

Today is Happy Minion Day.

Molly was obviously not deterred by the fact that I talked at her all day last week and Molly is coming up today again.

And so today my rainbow fingernails, red and blue crocs and the rest of myself will be happily making stamps and digging out glaze tests and making the last of the spoons for my trip to Warrandyte next month.

Here I am again on a Sunday morning getting a blog post ready for The Sunday Ceramics link up.

But all I can think about today is Invasion Day and my deep shame that today is the super duper penultimate racist free for all day in a year of racist asshattery and I just want to turn off the internet and ignore everything.

Australia Day should be a day of celebrating everything good about Australia, a day of moving forward, a day of remembering our Colonial history, of acknowledging invasion but it should ultimately be a day of healing and of celebrating together. We should be building on the foundation of goodwill generated by PM Rudd’s apology, instead we have this travesty of jingoistic nationalism. A day where the plan is to get as pissed as possible while listening to Triple Js hottest one hundred. A day of barbecues and simmering violence. One of the busiest days of the year for the Police and the Ambos. Straya Cunse Oi Oi Oi let’s get pissed, bash the missus and tell them fucken abos to get over themselves cause this is our day cunse. Straya Oi Oi Oi.

Now that is out of the way, said but not forgotten I might be able to think ceramic thoughts.

Last Thursday I had a ceramic student Molly, come and spend the day in my studio with me. I demonstrated the basics of slip casting as well as my super fast style of hand building, I talked all day, waved my arms around a lot, I even threw a cup, fresh out of the mould at Molly and she is still as keen as, to return again this week. Wow.

The benefits for me of having a student come and spend the day, is that Molly forces me to be more organised. I wanted to demonstrate what rutile did in a glaze and couldn’t find my test pieces, so this week I will sort out all my test tiles and put them in the one spot.

I also bought an extruder yesterday from a retiring potter and as I scavenged through her studio I found some texture stamps. These terracotta stamps are very neat and well made, where as my stamps are messy. So I think I have a good start to next weeks lesson as Molly and I will make some stamps.

My stamps are always an afterthought, made from any old left over clay that I have to hand, so I think I will make some stamps especially for my clay kids and for the adult groups I am going to be teaching this year.

Molly and I had a bit of a play with some shellac. I tend to avoid shellac as I become completely engrossed in the process and spend hours just fiddling away. This is Molly’s decoration on one of my cups. For those of you unfamiliar with the process, shellac or water etching is the technique of painting shellac onto a form and then, once the shellac is dry, gently washing away the clay surrounding it. The brown dots here that you can see is the shellac, and the dots will be raised bumps on the cup. The shellac will burn away in the bisque firing leaving the piece all white again. When I thought my youngest grand daughter was going to be severely vision impaired, it was shellac I was going to use to incorporate braille into my work.

I am busily making skulls and spoons, light things to take over to the Warrandyte Expo next month.

And that is me for the week, I was going to delete the bit about my thoughts on Invasion Day but as my politics are so entwined in my ceramics it felt a bit like cheating. I added in enough photos of ceramics so that you could ignore my words and just look at the photos.

Please join in the link up if you want, as the link will be open all week and I check it each day.

Just add your name and URL to the Mr Linky below.

Using the “Sunday Ceramics” title and photo I provided is OPTIONAL it is up to you.

Link back here to me.

Hello my muddy friends, thankfully it has cooled down enough that I needed to put socks on to ward off the early morning chill. I am a Tasmanian woman and I do not like the heat, I do not like how it makes everything clay related tricksy and more difficult than it should be. The heat distracts me and on hot days I am never fully present in the moment, I spend half my time watching for smoke on the horizon and the other half of the time my eyes are peeled for snakes looking for water.

The heat also mucks up my plans for world domination. On Tuesday it was 36 degrees up here at 11am and so Molly and I decided to postpone her mentoring session until next week.

I have been sidetracked by tampons this week mudslingers. I wrote about my mind shift from seeing the simple tampon as nothing more than an innocent bundle of cotton rolling about in the bottom of my handbag to a powerful symbol of freedom. My words are here, in an article titled “Stop The Tampons” if you want to read the full story.

The guts of the matter is that refugee women and girls do not have easy access to sanitary products. Destroy the Joint organised a protest asking women to send protest tampons to the minister for immigration, Scott Morrison

Morrison responded by publicly telling us women how very silly we were, and assuring us that the women and girls who are currently locked up in horrible conditions, have all the tampons they will ever need. He patted us on our little heads and told us to not bother the men while they were working out even more cruel ways to punish refugees. It has something to do with big boats and tow ropes and guns and faulty GPS, I think.

I do not like being patted on the head and so I made 50 ceramic protest tampons.

So here I am fellow mudworkers, sitting here at my computer talking about clay tampons. These are made from Southern Ice porcelain, so when they are fired they will be blindingly white. I have a very bright red underglaze and I am going to write on the tampons.

Hope. Integrity. Freedom. Decency. Asylum. Compassion.

And any other word that comes to mind.

The tampons are the sum of my weeks work and when I haven’t been thinking about human rights abuses I have been rescuing heat struck beetles and feeding them strawberries.

That was my week in clay.

How was yours?

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

Just add your name and URL to the Mr Linky below.

Using the “Sunday Ceramics” title and photo I provided is OPTIONAL it is up to you.

Link back here to me.

I am making ceramic tampons, these tampons are made from Southern Ice Porcelain and when fired, they will be blindingly white. The icy white background will make the red words I am going to paint on them even redder.

Here they are in their very raw state, waiting for their words, waiting for their strings, waiting to be turned into PROTEST 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 Governments propaganda machine has been working overtime to convince 60% of those one thousand people polled in this poll that refugees MUST be treated even more harshly.

Even more harshly? How can that be?

How can I look anyone in the eye when this is being done in my name?

The Anglican Parish of Gosford is a beacon of hope. Father Rod helps me to remember my humanity and shows me what a true Christian looks like. A real Christian has little resemblance to these mealy mouthed Christians of expediency, led by our current Prime Minister and his motley crew of shameless bullies and opportunists.

Australia is hurtling down the same path that Germany followed in the 1930s and those of you that roll their eyes and mutter she hit Godwin’s Law before she hit 500 words can go and play with the intelligentsia elsewhere, you have no place here on this blog.

Refugee arrivals are now recorded officially as numbers instead of names. Will we tattoo them next?

The simple tampon has now become a symbol of freedom.

As a free woman, I can walk into a shop and buy all the tampons I want. I also buy chocolate with my tampons.

Do refugee women get chocolates with their tampons? Do the guards dole out single pieces of melting Cadbury Dairy Milk along with rationed sanitary products?

Morrison’s comments at his press conference, published in the Guardian yesterday, make for interesting reading.

Scott Morrison has dismissed a campaign of sending tampons to his office to push for more open access to female sanitary products in detention centres as a “juvenile protest”.

“That was a ridiculous protest. The policy hasn’t changed. It’s been the same for years. There’s open access and continued access on demand, female welfare officers, all of those sorts of things,” he said.

For people to be sucked in and engage in this juvenile protest I think was very unfortunate, it is very disappointing and not the sort of thing that I would have thought that people who should be more responsible in the debate should be supporting in any way,” Morrison said.

When a powerful white man tells me that my protests are ridiculous I know that I am on the right track.

And what does “all those sorts of things” even mean?

I can assume it means all those sorts of women’s issues?

I despair internet.

I despair.

We are proudly trumpeting our hateful xenophobia to the world.

And I stand here and I loudly say, Not in my name. Never in my name.

Seeking Asylum is NOT ILLEGAL.

And in my despair and my powerlessness I make ceramic tampons as a protest, to show that I disagree and to show that Xenophobia has no place here with me.

Hello and welcome to the inaugural edition of Sunday Ceramics, a ceramic blog link up in the grand tradition of Adriana Christianson’s Mud Colony Blog.

I have been blogging now for over seven years and during that time I have been a part of, as well as host of, a number of blog link ups or memes as they used to be called back when blogging was shiny and new. Blog links are beneficial for a number of technical reasons, but the main reason I am concerned with today is the link of friendship and conversation.

As a ceramic artist I work in isolation, I think that most of us do. I go up to the studio and throw some mud around and when I come down to the house there is no one to talk to about the days work. My husband thinks that I am wonderful but he doesn’t understand what I am trying to do, his eyes glaze over when I talk about the joy of making rocks or the stories behind the dead sea birds. The Spouse is much more comfortable with talk of production pots made for sale rather than art pieces made to fill a hole in my soul.

Over the years I have used the blog successfully to “Think in Public” as I have an interested and engaged audience of readers who have become my friends, together we have planned new work and ceramic adventures. I take great comfort in the fact that my “Dear Internets” are always here ready to hold my hand when things go pear shaped. The conversations that start on the blog often move onto other platforms like facebook and twitter and I find I am having a multi layered conversation on multiple levels, which is just wonderful.

My readers like my NEW MINION give me much more than I give them and I am very grateful.

The rules for Sunday Ceramics are simple.

Just add your name and URL to the Mr Linky below.

 Using the “Sunday Ceramics” title and photo I provided is OPTIONAL it is up to you.

Link back here to me.

And then we can all go forth and CONQUER THE WORLD, I mean go forth and visit all the other lovely mudslingers who have joined in.

Easy Peasy.

If  you take the photo you can “right click and save as” or I can give you the html code, either way is fine.

Now for my ceramic doings this week.

I have been cleaning and reorganising my studio because in case you didn’t notice the words in all caps earlier. I HAVE A MINION. Oh the plots we can plot and the plans we can plan, the theme song to pinky and the brain has been playing on loop in my head all week.

On Tuesday I am going to be mentoring a ceramic student here in my home studio, I asked Molly if she minded me talking about my NEW MINION on the blog and Molly said that was fine. So yay an agreeable minion is even more fabulous.

But seriously it will be very good for me because if there is another artist here it means I actually have to go and do some work, as well as exercise the ceramic technical bits of my brain. Our first session will be spent working out a ceramic plan for Molly and then we shall spend the rest of the afternoon chatting and making test tiles ready for some glaze theory later on.

I am still trying to shake of the holiday lethargy and so work has been slow but I am not in a race and so if I make at least one thing a day I can call that winning.

I am enjoying making these little houses very much. My clay kids taught me that not everything I make has to be serious, that I am allowed to have fun.

These birds are serious though with a serious message but that is a story for another Sunday. In this image below, the bird on the left has a  wonky eye, which I fixed after I published the photo on instagram. 

I am using BRT clay and these two have been painted with Southern Ice Porcelain slip. I plan on making 50 birds for an installation later on in the year and I shall be interested to see where they take me.

There always seems to be a conversation about breasts happening somewhere on the internet and I am thinking of making some shark boobies, the breasts that bite back.

I am also making textured cups again, the last of my Sclerophyll cups are up at the Three Windows Gallery in Oatlands. I am having some cracking issues that I think are because the textured strips are too thin and so are drying out too fast even when wrapped in plastic. This fish hasn’t cracked as yet so that counts as a win.

I think that is it for me for the week. Welcome to the first Sunday Ceramics of 2014. Please add your blog post to the link below if you would like to join in.