Tag Archives: City Lit

New term, New work

The second year of the diploma is now well under way and I have been very busy planning and making for the last few weeks.  Two projects are currently under way; the Journey project which obsessed me all over the summer and a throwing project to make a working fountain.

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River meanders under construction
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Fountain project – in need of more work!

My journey project uses the metaphor of a river to consider life’s journey, collecting memories and experiences along the way.  I am making a series of meanders which will interlock to demonstrate progression and which will contain artefacts gathered on my walk from the mouth of the River Thames to its source.  The fountain project is proving much more fun than I had expected.  The way it will work is complicated and I am not ready to reveal it yet but I can assure you that the prototype was tested yesterday and water was successfully pumped through it to appear in the right places.  Hopefully the main piece will be slightly less warped -more structural clay – and the water which exits the holes in the fountain will be controllable enough that the water will remain in the right area and not soak the work of my neighbours during our assessment!

Ways of thinking

Sometimes in the heat of my studio I find it impossible to think at all but that does nothing to alleviate the problem of needing to plan a number of projects for next term at college.  The problem for me is that the expectation is that we fill sketch books with our ideas and come back next term bursting with clear understanding about how our plans can be converted into works of a 3D nature.  This is all well and good if you think in two dimensions.  The trouble is that I don’t!  I know this now.  It makes sketch books a bit of a problem – they can become very unwieldy very quickly!  So I have travelled my journey and thought about the metaphorical references to life in walking the length of the Thames from Barrier to source – some might say this was taking an uphill look at the problem – and I have wandered the internet and the local garden centres looking at fountains but in the end, there is nothing else for it.  I just had to penetrate the heat of the studio and make something. So here is the beginnings of my idea for the fountain and also for the river project.  I just hope they can develop a bit more on paper as well or my sketch book is going to be decidedly fat.

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The real fish which I used to do this cooked in the plaster of Paris causing a dreadful stink in the studio which hung around for days so I thought a would also take a sprig of the only bits which were left. I am sure I can use them somewhere!
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I have a wonderful piece of driftwood fished out of the river at Richmond. The plan is to position these on it with the line of the river running along them, the lines from a poem running through them and the images, or ghosts of images, from the walk flowing from one to the other.
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I don’t really throw so this project is something of a challenge to me – in which case, why not go kitsch!
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This is a core of the most fantastic clay dug from the river bank. It like a great terra cotta to me, almost pure. I am going to fire one to earthenware and one to stoneware to see what happens and then decide how to make use of them.