Tag Archives: City Lit Arts

Popping Up

This week I have joined a number of my City Lit Diploma graduate contemporaries in signing the least on a small unoccupied premises in Camden.  The council in this most enlightened borough of London believes that it is bad for the area to have too many empty shops and so they have come up with a fantastic idea to support emerging businesses.  For a short period they pay your rent and electricity bills and you contract to open the shop and make the area look more lively.  Well it seemed to us like an opportunity too good to ignore and so Klay was born!

We are a group of 12 ceramic artists, some making functional pieces, others decorative, but all of us working in the realm of contemporary ceramics.  The shop doesn’t look like much at the moment but with a lick of paint and some clean shelving, it has real promise.  There is a great little café next door and a couple of other galleries in the area and transport links are great; Kentish Town and Chalk Farm stations nearby and a bus stop right outside.  So now the hard work begins – designs, bags, bubble wrap, decoration, payment methods, rotas for manning – and, oh yes, making!  Going to be a frantic few weeks I feel!

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It only needs a lick of paint!

 

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It only needs a lick of paint!

The Doyenne of Ash Glazes

There are a number of reasons why the subject of ash glazes has been on my mind in recent weeks.  One of the best is that, just before Christmas, I was given a lovely little dish by Katharine Pleydell-Bouverie, one of Britain’s real pioneers of studio pottery.  She was known for the subtly of the colours on her pieces which she achieved through the use of ash glazes.  This little dish looks as if it might have been a test piece.  It is only about 10cm diameter.  Mind you, if my test pieces looked as good as this I would be in Heaven!

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My very own little Pleydell-Bouverie

The glaze is a very subtle green.  The crazing is interesting as it is smaller where the glaze is thin and larger where it has pooled in the dish.  It has also drawn a lot of iron out of the clay causing a delicious toasted ring.  Every time I look at it, and I do so very frequently because I cannot quite believe it is mine, I think about the experimental ash glazes which I tried for the diploma.  Most of my test glazes are sitting on a shelf in the studio and I begin to wonder why on earth I am not having another go with them because they certainly showed some promise and, given the relationship between my pieces and place, there is a good reason for using local ash as well.  It might give my work something even more.

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Probably high time I explored my own ash glaze tests a bit further.