Making Our Mark!

Our first real taste of clay arrived today at the Uclan workshop. Playing with texture and mark making were on the agenda. Using different moisture levels in clay we used different materials and tools to create surface texture to see how the clay reacted.

The red clay was leather hard and the grey clay was much softer. In general, the mark making process on leather hard clay was much crisper and cleaner defined. However the softer grey clay allowed greater distortion from manipulating and stretching the clay.

Later in the day we built on this initial work and developed 12 cm tiles themed from manmade/mechanical, natural/nature and feelings/emotions, creating five tiles in each area. These tiles would then be bisque fired ready for testing glazes in a few weeks time.

Nature (top row l-r)

1 Dry slurry on rolling pin

2 Pumice stone

3 Wet slurry rolled with rolling pin

4 Leather hard clay pushed into tile

5 Finger pushes

Feelings, emotions, sensations (middle row l-r)

1 Frustration

2 Braille

3 Feeling up and down

4 OCD

5 Trapped

Manmade (bottom row l-r)

1 Folded material

2 Metal grid

3 Metal ruler sliced into tile, rolled edge

4 Plastic tube at various depths

5 Edge of GR form

My favourite tiles are Nature No 3, Manmade No 1 and No 5. I can not wait for them to be fired and glazed, it would be interesting to see if my preferences change through the making process.