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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.
Above are sets of images I took of several of my ceramics pieces (you can click on the images for a larger view - use the back button on your browser to get back here). Most of them were completed during my 8-week session at Choplet ceramics studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, this winter. (The two plates at the bottom were made during a shorter class I took last April at Brick House in Queens.) It was such a great learning experience! My favorite part was experimenting with various glazing techniques - I was guided in this by my class instructor at Choplet, Damien, as well as my friend Christina. Christina showed me how to use an oxide to create the really cool effect on the funky little incense burner (third one down), and served as a general adviser as I scrambled to get all of my glazing experiments into the kiln by the end of the last class.
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