These:
and these:
At least that’s what I was creating through August or so. I switched from red earthenware to some white that I have had laying around for a while. I was still working with the same angular forms with a drippy, crackle glaze but this time in a lighter palate.
I have been undergoing this transition from functional pottery to sculptural objects for a while and I felt like the next logical step would be to make some gallery-appropriate pieces that could hang on a wall. My other production-limiting factors still had to be dealt with, namely my teeny tiny kiln. I had been creating squiggly line pendants for a while and found that making and glazing many smaller pieces separately allowed for a versatility and flexibility that I couldn’t achieve with forming larger pieces and glaze firing them all as one. Thematically I had been reducing my work to basic, bold shapes (lines, circles, polygons) and these factors resulted in the following:
These pendants are assembled from what are essentially beads with only one hole. I started firing hundreds and hundreds of spheres in a variety of colors and then epoxied them together into larger pieces. Some of the bigger beads (or balls) are thrown on the wheel and thus hollow, allowing for them to be hung on the wall easily:
I should mention that content-wise I had been pondering the connotations that lot of my glazes had - the black crackle glaze over green looked like dragon skin or the turquoise green resembled the Caribbean Sea. This evolved into the molecule-like forms you see here - they are building blocks of a concept, in a way. However the two pieces above are more studies in color than anything else.
As this work evolves I’ll write a bit more on where I think it’s going. I have intentions of ceramic work that goes beyond formal aspects.
This blog post was a painfully difficult exercise in pounding out sentances. I haven’t done this in a while.