Tag Archives: Clay

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.