Live long and prosper — by social distancing! Potter Tom Edwards knows what's up. His new "Kirk and Spock's Social Distancing Alert! Mug" ($40) sends the message of "stay away!" loud and clear in an old-school Star Trek way.
Be sure to check out his other wares, including this bowl ($35) that announces that there's LSD in the dip... a little too late.
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Thanks, Marcia! Read the rest
Chattering is a pottery wheel technique where a tool bounces against the rotating piece, creating a pattern of small divots. When it's time to paint it, a hypnotic visual effect appears. Read the rest
Nerikomi is a classical form of pottery where different colored clays are rolled into cylinders, then cross-sectioned to reveal a pattern. So soothing to watch the string cut through!
Faith Rahill has a great step-by-step demonstration here:
Nerikomi (often referred to as “neriage”) is a decorative process established in Japan that involves stacking colored clay and then slicing through the cross section to reveal a pattern, which can then be used as an applied decoration. Nerikomi designs provide a wonderful way to work three dimensionally with patterns and images. The results reflect a combination of both careful planning and accidental surprise, plus it’s exciting work for those who love patterns and are drawn to the wet-clay stage of pottery making.
Here are a couple more examples with far less annoying music. The agate pottery revealed after firing the glaze is especially nice:
• Centuries old pottery gets new layer (YouTube / NHK WORLD-JAPAN) Read the rest
If you need a break from the stress of the world, just sit back and watch these relaxing pottery videos from Chris Casey Art. You can learn more and purchase Casey’s pottery on his website.
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View this post on InstagramRead the restA few people have asked about centering so here's a bit on how I approach it while throwing a vase.
Cephalopods and ceramics fuse in Keiko Masumoto's whimsical updates of traditional Chinese ceramic forms. Read the rest
Jon Almeda makes impossibly small hand-thrown ceramics in a series called Pots in Different Spots. Below are some finished works: Read the rest
At a pottery fair in Pittsburgh, I ran into Kimberlyn Bloise, who makes handsome musical instruments that are also mugs, vases and pendants. They sound and look wonderful, and have the strange quality of something both charming and haunting, like remnants of a vanished culture. You can order them from her online shop.
I put a lot of testing into my instruments, but none of them plays a full scale, and none are traditionally tuned. The clay changes so much from when I begin to working with it to when I have the finished product. It shrinks and expands, and the pitches change along with it. What I have been able to do is figure out where to place the holes in relation to the size of the resonating chamber (the hollow handle) so that the notes all sound good together on each individual piece. The flute mugs all play parts of a blues scale! Could I figure out traditional tuning on all of them? Probably. But it would take so much planning and effort, and my prices would have to reflect that. I'm sure you've noticed that "real" instruments are quite expensive, and I don't want to make mine that pricey! Plus, I don't intend for anyone to play the flute handle in any professional capacity, so I don't sweat it too much.
Here's a flute hidden in a mug handle:
The large horn vase:
Here is the "complaining husky" horn vase:
And the bouncy udu:
When most of us gaze upon an eight-place setting of fine porcelain china or a curvaceous ceramic vase, we see exactly that, but when Jim Robinson of Rookwood Pottery looks at such objects, he sees rocks, as I learned recently when I interviewed Robinson about his role as the venerable art pottery firm's glaze chemist.
Read the restHis interest in rocks and geology came early. “When I was in high school in 1967,” he says, “I had a great professor, Richard Tremblay, who got into plate tectonics just as it was emerging. He explained to us how the surface of the planet was skidding around, powered by these upwellings of magma, and how when two plates encountered each other, one went down into the subduction zone and the other sprouted mountains. Well, I came seriously unglued when I heard that, and I’ve been reading about rocks and geology ever since.”
To put it mildly, this love of rocks and minerals has completely colored Robinson’s world. “I’m looking out a window now at a brick building,” he tells me as we are chatting over the phone. “Every brick building is made out of different clays. Some are kind of taupe gray. Some are really deep rust. Every brick is different because each comes out of a different hole in the ground. That just blows my mind.” More particularly, Robinson’s romance with stone has had a profound impact on his work as a ceramist. “Once you get an image in your mind of the earth and how active it is,” he says, “you start to put two and two together.
TORTUS: SPIN from Tortus Copenhagen on Vimeo.
It looks like the room and everything in it is spinning around a fixed potter's wheel.
Mr.Romance's lovely video of master artisans creating ceramics is a super-chill look at the beautiful techniques being practiced in the South Korean city of Icheon. Read the rest
