Made From Fife: July 2012

Friday, 20 July 2012

Delivery!

All packed and ready to go aboard MAC...!

Thursday, 19 July 2012

Installing the plates and cups in the dresser

Filling the drawers with the seived out material

Here are the plates we are going to use for our Made From Fife piece, along with the material sieved out of the clayey soil.

Lids for the drawers and backs for plates

I still have the display to finish.

In that big blue insulated box sits all of our glazed plates and cups...

Loading the big glaze firing

Everything has been glazed, ready to put in the big kiln. Nervous times indeed. "I'm putting all my eggs in one basket" by Ella Fitzgerald keeps singing through my head.

These are nervous times for us, as we get to the end of months of work and present our work to the kilns to do there bit. Through heat, soft pliable clay irreversibly transforms into a hard rock like substance. It is an amazing change, but can often present us with surprises.

Weighing the material sieved out of the clay

Here are all the stones, gravel, sand, twigs and leaves that was sieved out of our selection of clays, collected in a fine selection of containers found close to hand. The job today was to work out the exact ratio of waste to clay used in the making of each plate, so that we can represent how clayey the soil from our various locations in Fife is.

Some of the QR codes don't work on the plates taken out of the biscuit kiln a couple of days ago. Luckily, bisque is just soft enough to scratch with a scalpel. It is still hard work, though and takes me the whole morning.

Glamis Road Allotment footring

As it turns out, this dresser is looking quite good. I has a nice quiet presence.

Display construction

We decide to make a Scottish-style dresser in MDF. We had considered having a beautiful dresser made in Scottish oak, but we felt this might detract from the plates and cups, and they story that they are telling. It may be that an oak dresser will be required, but at least this dresser will act as a model for that one, in terms of getting the proportions and sizes correct.

One thing we realised from the bisque, is that the QR codes need to be accurate enough to give robust scanning results. This one wasn't working so well, so Christine made some adjustments before it went in the kiln.

Moments of truth. There is nothing quite like opening a kiln, especially when using new (to me) materials and I don't know how it is going to behave.

Cup making with all the clays

The above shows what we ended up with, and below shows how I made them. I am struck by the beautiful array of colours and the different clay textures. Some of the clays are difficult to throw with, which is partly why I chose this simple shape, but also because the shape is in keeping with the straight-forward nature of Country Pottery. The cups will be glazed inside and just a little over the rim - putting your lip against an unglazed clay surface can feel unpleasant, such is the sensitivity of our mouths and what we are used to.