Ceramics, Part IV - My First Wheel-Throwings

I am very excited to have successfully thrown a couple of pots on the potter's wheel. This was not an easy feat for me!

The first step in the process is called "centering," during which you shape the clay into a cone, and then flatten it, and cone it and flatten it again, until it spins in the center of the wheel without showing any signs of wobble.

The trick is bracing your elbows against your body so that your hands put even pressure on the clay. You make yourself as solid as possible so that the clay moves in the way you are directing it - rather than having a wobbly mound of clay make you move and wobble, too! (I was pretty wobbly, at first, until the brilliant head of the Ceramic studio, Nadiege, came over and helped me adjust myself. Thanks, Nadiege!!! You're the best.)

This shot was taken in the beautiful backyard garden work-space at Choplet in Williamsburg. Those are my two wheel-spun pieces, sitting on bats, starting to dry. (Next step: shaping and trimming. Then: firing and glazing!)

Ceramics - Part 1

Fossils

For my latest project, I have collected various articles from nature, which I am going to imprint in clay in a pottery studio to make a series of Christmas ornaments.


Many of these I found along the street just walking through Brooklyn. I also found shells in Cape May, NJ and East Hampton, and pine cones in Cold Spring Harbor and Colorado Springs during excursions this fall. As a play off of my fixation with time passage, I thought it would be interesting to see fossilized traces of nature from summer and fall, for the express purpose of decoration for a winter holiday.

The holidays often become a time for reflection on the year leading up to that point as our Western calendar draws to a close. It is also the darkest time of the year, a time for hibernation, a time of stillness before rebirth. Traces of the other seasons linger in our minds at this introspective time, and I hope that my fossil ornament series will serve as a symbol of that.

I took a hand-building pottery class in the spring, and so the next step in this process is getting a glazing lesson. I will be glazing a cup and bowl I previously made at Brick House, in Queens.

With hand-building and glazing under my belt, I will begin my fossil project by cutting round shapes out of clay, and using the objects pictured here to create imprints on each. They will be fired, glazed, and fired again before I string them and give them as gifts. I will document this process in photos, as well.