Sunday 11 April 2010

Ceramics class: from the kiln

Above: the result of our slab-building exercise: a little house based on the strangely proportioned one below. My proportions are sadly not quite as exaggerated as they could have been. The red roof was also an abberation but I have grown to like it. And I still love the house below and might use it as part of something else one day.
Above: by the way, never bring any special books or pictures to ceramics class or they will end up as ratty as this.

Above: the result of our first exercise, coil building, where (as the name suggests) you make coils and then build them upwards, smoothing them with your little tools as you go. In the last hour of our last class, my strange shape decided to become a pointy babushka type object. I am trying to decide whether to add anything to her or not (using acrylic paints that is -- ssshhhh).

Above: the boy gendarme, who also starred in this previous post. My relationship with glazing is a fraught one. Basically I don't 'get' it and am too much of a control freak to leave the results of painting something with a strange thick substance that looks nothing like the colour that it purports to be on the jar to an oven that may or may not blow it up in the process of cooking it at well over 1000 degrees celsius.
But I still love making things out of clay. Maybe I will commit the ultimate ceramic traditionalist's sin and paint them using acrylic like I did many years ago in my TAFE class. Although this time if I am tut-tutted by the ceramic powers that be I won't care a jot now that I am a big girl.

2 comments:

Elaine Prunty said...

you;ve made me want to do a ceramics class next, I love the house, straight out of a fairytale, and i wasn't thinking anything rude that you could add to babushka until you said sssshhhhh.....;0)
lovely work ms eterovic..go straight to the top of the class. the ceramic powers that be are waiting there with a big huge trophy and an oversized bottle of champagne.

Sandra Eterovic said...

Always good to hear from you, Elaine! Ha!! I wasn't thinking of anything rude...but now I am funnily enough...hmmm...
Here is the sad tale: when I was young and impressionable I was accepted into a student exhibition at a respected craft gallery. When the powers that be found out that I painted rather than G L A Z E D my work, they cancelled my spot. I was scarred and barely touched clay for years!!!! Youth. I should have told them where to go, of course. But I didn't.

Happy Spring, Elaine! ;)