A Working Body

Last month I was finishing a body of work that I had been thinking about for a couple of months.  I’ve been trying to think of a way to make work with the limitations of not being able to glaze my work, our current kilns are not trustworthy enough to do anything but glaze in.  In my last body of work I used markers to touch up and add to the scenes on the pots, I really like how this looks and had wanted to use it again.  So with this new work (and not being able to glaze anything) I decided to go full out and use marker to decorate all the vessels in this series.  I expanded a little bit to include different colored India inks, these I used mostly for the banding lines and for larger areas that needed to be filled.  I made this new work out of a commercial clay body called B-Mix (cone 10), it is a mixture of porcelain and a white stoneware.  This gave me a smooth white surface for the stories I wanted to convey, it also allowed the markers and inks to “pop” off of the surface of the vessels. 

                The actual content of this body started with doodles I used to do when I was in primary school.  I would draw a cave or dungeon type scene with traps and treasures hidden within them.  I would then draw a little stick adventure man to climb, swing, and jump his way through the drawing discovering all the hidden things I had placed.  I had shown Keturah (my wife) how I would draw these when I was a kid and she loved them, she thought they were the funniest thing she had ever seen, and said that it would be a good transition from my last body of work to a new one if I could put them on to some pots.  So I sat down and sketched out some ideas in my (hand-i-dandy) sketch book of what kind of stories I wanted to convey, and then I moved into the studio and threw some forms that I thought would look good if seen from a distant.  I then bisque fired them in our converted gas kilns, and then after some hesitation (I always get nervous before committing pen to paper or in this case pen to vessel) I started drawing onto the forms I had made.  Here are some of the finished pieces:

The drawings evolved from the adventure man traversing caves to Greek style stick figure pieces.  I have always been a huge fan of Greek pottery; I really enjoy the variety of shapes and the wide range of subject matter they portray.  So I made some Greek inspired vessels and gave them some Greek styled stick figure scenes.  Here are a few pictures:

I really enjoy using humor in my work, and the idea of bait and switch.  By that I mean I enjoy giving the viewer something beautiful to look at from afar, while putting enough detail in the scenes to draw the viewer closer to the work.  At which point they realize that that beautiful vessel is decorated with stick figures and scenes from a child’s over active imagination.