Studio Saturday - welcome gifts

At the ceramics studio, it was all happening on Thursday and Friday this week.

On Thursday, the arrival - thank you Mary! - of  two larger saggers and ball clay for sealing them, kiln furniture, buckets, china clay, casting slip, black slip, porcelain for slab building, black grogged clay. They are sitting on "the desk" to await use. One such use was mooted at our meeting on Friday - a group project of making things that use the saggers.

Thinking ahead to projects and spending time at the studio, I thumbed through a few old magazines to find inspiration ...

mark making

first make your plaster cast....

this is a kiln!

japanese patterning

combining clay and cloth

intimately connected pairs

mad, but inspiring!

Mark making - two afternoons at Morley

"Mark making for ceramics" was the title of the course. Tutor Jo asked us to follow her instructions about using the materials and the book of papers that she'd supplied. I'm always glad when the world of infinite possibilities gets limited somehow, whether by materials or subject matter or instructions.

First we used hard and soft pencils, and graphite and eraser, to draw lines across the pages. Simple and satisfying, right up my (travel-lines) street, in fact.

Noticing the feel, and the look, and what happens at the edge of the page...

White wax crayon and scratching and ink - been there, done that, but every time is different depending on what's gone before and what the purpose of doing it might be...

Scratching harder through wax into card - now we're getting somewhere...

 Landscapes emerge ...

 ...and all sorts of things happen when a tiny dot of ink is added to a big drop of water -

 Monoprinting - again, the type of mark that comes from different pencils -

 and from other items, surfaces and sticks for instance -

 or even by rolling a hexagonal pencil! -

Jo had also prepared some plaster blocks for carving into; these could be developed as stamps for clay -

 Using windows to find interesting areas - these are about 5cm square -

The eraser-carving is based on favourite marks -

The trees aren't abstract or simple but I have this thing about the way tree branches spread out, or not, and have never explored that idea.

The erasers turned out to be great for printing in grids.

In the second session I glued down some squares cut from the marks made last week, and we made 3d cylinders which gave an entirely different perspective to the marks/lines -

 Then we used a variety of scraps and put them between layers of acetate into slide holders. These are tiny pieces and it was a bit fiddly ...

 ... but when projected on the wall, what great effects!

cellophane and string

colour overlap

thin folded strips

scratching on the acetate

Studio Saturday

Having discussed the matter of getting a small kiln with the others, who decided that yes there's room and yes it would be a good idea, I followed on from the quick discussion at the Hatfield show with some further questions. So that's underway, and the sooner we have a small kiln that I can fire small batches of small pots in, the better! 

The big kiln - with space at the side for a little one

Meanwhile the production of "series" of similar pots - or, at this stage, tubes - continues. They are in the same fabric or technique but have distinguishing marks so that a record of their treatment can be kept, with a view to discovering what actually works. And then, "if it works, do it some more".

Springy, thick linen thread

Slippery, thin cotton thread

The worktable (aka coffee table) holds a series crocheted in dishcloth cotton and the start of a series crocheted in old wool yarn, tapestry wool - the label says Scheepjes Gobelin - ombrand niet verwijderen streng apwikkelen door los eind uit omband te trekken. A 10-metre packet is perfect for a pot, and I have quite a few packets. The metallic thread is either crocheted in or stitched on later.

Quite possibly this table will never become a "centre of simplicity".

 At the actual studio, I have dipped a few pots - three -

The slip was getting very thick, so I diluted it a bit, keeping a record of the weight of the slip before and after water was added, and trying to carefully note the consistency, though how that can be objectively measured and/or described is beyond me! "Consistency of double (or single) cream" - that's not truly objective, but might be a good comparison.

This pot had huge holes around the stitches; I used the hair dryer in hopes of solidifying it a bit, especially around those holes, and then dipped it again. Fingers crossed the holes won't reappear as it dries out -

The cut-down 2-litre water bottle is my standard measure for the slip - I hope that by filling it to the same point, and noting the weight of the (diluted) slip, it will give an objective measurement of consistency. And when small kiln firings are possible, it might be possible to see how dilute the slip can be.

And perhaps different consistencies make for more or less cracking during drying. Or perhaps the tiny cracks are due to fast or slow drying, who knows? Or to the material, eg sinamay vs silk vs linen?

Zen circles

What a nice shape the circle is. Drawing a perfect circle was quite a show-off feat in medieval/renaissance times -- but that's not what I'm doing here. I'm focusing on making each one, and making many, attentively, with various media and tools - and with both hands.

Right hand on the right; left hand on the left.
A random selection of pencils and pens

Dilute india ink (it had solidified in the bottle and I added water in
a failed attempt to revive it) with
a mop brush, chinese brush, and glass dip pen

Full-strength japanese ink, with chinese brush, different dip pen,
and rigger brush

 The rigger is tricky for circles -

Supply lists

In the next few weeks I'll be attending various summer courses, ranging from two evenings to a full day to two full days to - the scary one - a residential course for a week. (The previous courses are a warm-up for that week-long course.) 

Some provide all materials, and some have a list of things to bring.

The risk is that the materials provided will be basic and, frankly, poor quality. With a supply list, the risks are either that it's too prescriptive and involves unnecessary purchases, or too comprehensive and you don't use many of the items. The latter is particularly onerous if you use public transport - it would be no fun to hoist a sewing machine into the overhead rack on the train.

Considering these matters, my Inner Rebel pipes up: "Use what you find there at the time - it'll be a challenge!" and Miss Sensible ripostes: "You won't get the most out of the course if you constantly have to Make Do or use manky paintbrushes - be prepared!"

Possibly they're both right. One of the courses, two days of image making with textile media, asks us to bring

"A short piece of text (newspaper/magazine article, story, poem or favourite song), fabric or trimmings that you feel could be visually relevant (colour or texture)."

The Inner Rebel is hopping up and down like Rumpelstiltzken -

(via; by Walter Crane)

.......but watch out, Inner Rebel, remember what happened to Mr R -

with anger he stomped his right foot so hard into the ground that he fell in up to his waist. Then with both hands he took hold of his left foot and ripped himself up the middle in two.

The Inner Rebel doesn't want to be prepared, doesn't want to brood ahead of time on what . The Inner Rebel - aka the Artist - wants to respond to what might happen, what's happening on the page, what might be done next ... she wants possibilities  and surprises and new directions. She does not want to go down the straight track of "what's supposed to be", to be herded with the other mice through the only exit. NonononoNO! She is willing to be ripped up the middle and is starting to think this would be appropriate for much of the laborious (but instructive) work she has made over the years.

The Inner Rebel is aware of time's wing-ed chariot drawing near - she is rebelling also at how, suddenly, everything takes so  l o n g   and how she can no longer do three things at once with equal attention. (Miss Sensible, too, is nostalgic for those days, but has taken on board that multi-tasking is counterproductive.)

But this isn't a good cop - bad cop  situation. There's another player here - Action Woman, aka She Who Does The Work.

Left to Miss Sensible, everything would be over-considered, honed to perfection. "Everything" would not come to much, it would hardly be anything.

Left to the Inner Rebel, a lot of fun would be had but unacceptable messes would be made.

It's up to Action Woman to set a considered pace, to clean up those messes, to set the level of competence or interestingness or bravado or newness that separates the immediate rejects (torn up the middle) from the save-for-now work (reconsider in three months or three years).

She also has to rein in Miss Sensible, to over-ride the fussiness and hold on to real sense, and get something happening in the Real World rather than just as ideas in the Ideal World.

It's up to Action Woman to decide on how to handle the supply lists. In the example above, to have decided on the text and chosen the fabric seems to be a prescription for the finished work - what can the course add, apart from technical suggestions?

It's serendipity and spontaneity that make Action Woman leap into action - for example, in a 2010 painting course for which I had an idee fixe at the outset, finding this photo in a discarded magazine

completely changed the painting, from beginning to outcome.

Action Woman also likes the challenge of found materials, for example using scraps, as in this - and many other - small quilts -

For the course in question, I shall bring several "sources" and scoop some scraps and textural trimmings into a bag, as well as some bigger pieces of plain fabric. My aim is to use lumps and bumps and slashes and other textural marks so that the "illustration" can become a fabric/dipped pot - this is an intention, not a prescription. 

And to please Miss Sensible I'll bring my own tools - not just needles and threads, but fabric pens and paintbrushes (and maybe even some nice paint) "just in case". 

Who knows, maybe a "short piece of text" will be discovered by the Inner Rebel on the day, and maybe there'll be a big bag of fabric and trimmings already in the classroom.

The dilemma about supply lists, though, continues....

Giorgio Griffa at Camden Arts Centre

The exhibition finished in early April; I went several times, the work really grew on (?in) me. A video in which the artist talks about the work, and his relationship to the materials, is here.

Lines and shapes of colour painted onto, or rather, into, unprimed fabric, which has been folded and retains those fold marks. Many works are large and fill the rooms of the gallery wonderfully. It was hard to stop taking photographs: each new angle was another spatial revelation.

Frammenti, a work from the 1980s, was reconfigured in response to the
architecture, atmospherics, and light of the gallery

The number used in these works from the early 2000s is the Golden Ratio

 Details -

When I revisited, just before the exhibition closed, I spent some time in the Reading Room, where books about Griffa's previous exhibitions were laid out.

This collage (?montage) of marks on transparent paper, exhibited at the XXXIX Venice Biennale (1980) caught my eye and imagination ... how, if at all, could it be done in stitch (and: why?) ....

Other works had been exhibited in a medieval palazzo in 1995 -

One of the books had text on the right-hand page, and a tantalising flutter of careful marks and colours on the left -

 In his studio! -

 A happy conjunction of fragments -

 Larger works, fitted onto the page -

 Fragments and overlays -

"Griffa sees painting as an unmediated experience of the physical world. Though often minimal from afar, his works invite intimate attention to the exacting behaviours of their materials, to consider the experience of pigment on canvas at a molecular level. ... The modest appearance [of the creased canvases] reaffirms their reality in material and temporal terms, while underlying each work with a geoetric grid."