where to go

Dust is settling from the new beginnings in the midlands and starting Clay College.

The dust settles both metaphorically within me as I gently find my pulse at MiddlePort and literally in the workshop as it remains mainly empty for the winter break. At home, researching, reflecting, diving down DigitalFire rabbit holes, day (and night) dreaming of what’s possible to achieve during the next two years. What was once a long outstretched horizon of two big pregnant years can soon become more of a blink to a busy mind. It has been a source of contemplation as to how to make the most of my time here, which will be everything from extensive, laborious and generously seductive in potential, to infuriating and Sisyphean and inevitably too short to realise it all. SO the question remains, how to use my time the wisest and what do I really want to achieve in this time? Where do I want to be when I leave and what do I need to do to get there?

It is important for me to pursue the greenest practice possible, low-impact and resourcefulness. This thread will guide me towards my practice being as energy, ethically and environmentally positive as it can be when I leave college, exploring alternatives to materials such as Cobalt and Lithium have already hit my radar and I am yet to fully comprehend the abundance of glaze chemistry. I still want to achieve that rich blue but without supporting slave and child labor in the DRC. If I am to stick with earthenware I will have to consider my options without using Lead glazes. I am engrossed by alternative firing and the potential surface treatments for salt, soda and wood firings but they will not be until after the new year.

As we are so meticulously exploring each clay body I am well and truly stuck into terracotta and learning about her luscious and mysterious bahaviours with other materials. There is a fine balance in the luscious world of earthenware slips between a juicy surface and a slaking or over cooked one. Slip, at a pint weight of around 25/26 can be applied to a just-turned-to leather hard surface, no sooner, no later.

If I am to embed earthenware into my practice my main intention was to find a blue glaze that is bright and shiny at this temperature without using cobalt. Having achieved that now I am left with a sloppy messy body that loves to stain and feels notably juvenile in its essence compared to other seemingly more self-serious bodies of stoneware and porcelain which are all to come.