Ceramics 2

Week 2 at Art School - p.1

Today was our second session in the ceramics studio. I had also gone in for a couple of hours yesterday to do some "experimenting" with dipping things in slip (liquid clay). The gist of what I learnt was that slip shrinks as it dries, and if you try and cover waxy, non-absorbant stuff with it, it either simply slides off, or cracks as it dries. Bummer. The trouble is, it is not always obvious what things are NOT non-abosorbant. Anyways, we all brought in lots of different things to dip, so it will be a collective learning experience.

Here are some of the things I made and experimented with (pre-firing):


And here is a picture of me "slip-trailing" some tiles I made based on the drawing exercise from last week.


This stuff needs to be left to dry and will go in the kiln for "biscuit firing" next week. I will edit this entry later with a picture of the stuff that survived!

A couple of books on ceramics found in the library that I liked:
1)The Ceramic Process, by Anton Reijnders (ISBN: 0-8122-3932-6) and
2)Ceramics and Print (2nd Ed.), by Paul Scott (ISBN: 0-8122-1800 0)

Art and design history lecture today was "The Impact of Industrialisation".