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january wood

Posted jane -->on 31st Jan 2012

january sunshine; the roof of the wood is a lattice of branches letting the blue sky in. the beech tree’s naked trunk twists and turns like a mature-bodied dryad, in the centre of its glade, floored with copper leaves

here the wood is thicker and still makes a dark shade contrasting its boundary with the open field.

the wood is dry and crackling with leaves underfoot. no signs of primrose or violet yet, although the woodpecker’s drumming rings through the trees on these sunny days and the great tit has begun his repetitive two tone song.

clumps of elm trees have died and collapsed; until the inevitable clones spring up from the roots the wood is opened up to daylight and brambles are spreading; there is less cover for the roe deer and I rarely see them. today a hare got up and ran out of the trees as we walked through, noisily cracking dead twigs and making our clumsy way, no doubt spreading alarm amongst the inhabitants.

in my garden the snowdrops are out, and the celandines. the first promise of life this year.

continuing to make pieces with plant impressions; this is clematis harvested from the tangle of dead stuff round the pillars of the verandah.

the first biscuit firing done, and now a glaze firing to prepare for the first day of february.

frosty

Posted jane -->on 16th Jan 2012

the first wintery weather of the year, and a high pressure system gave us pretty frost pictures today – even nettles become decorative with delicate crystalline structures drawing white lines around each vein and jagged edge.

thistles have every hair outlined.

the sun was melting everything in its path

but in the shadows frosted leaves sparkled

and pattern gleamed softly

back in the shed I have added another layer to the porcelain, by washing china clay slip over it then sprinkling on china clay powder, and gently pressing it in with the rolling pin.

three tallish bottles to fill a space in the kiln

and another rectangular piece – there are a few of these now –

the impression of stems from the garden weakens and sometimes ruptures the pot wall, making interesting non-curved planes as the slab is bent around.

these crusty surfaces on darker clays work well with the saltmarsh and chalk beach glazes, but the white st thomas stoneware clay will make a difference, I need plenty of them so I can experiment.

dogwood

Posted jane -->on 7th Jan 2012

a break for family Christmas and I am off again. some good news this week, I have been selected for Hatfield ceramics fair, Art in Clay, 6th, 7th, 8th July, in the grounds of Hatfield Hall. so I have to dust off my tent and find a trailer to borrow – and work out how a space of 4 metres by 4 metres with a couple of tables can be made to show off pots ….

so – continuing from the work I was doing with porcelain, I began by opening a bag of white St Thomas clay – a good almost-white stoneware – sprinkling my dust-to-large-bits-grog on it, impressing oak leaves and the hole-patterned piece of wood.

but recently I saw a beautiful and strange portrait of a woman wearing a high collar of ash twigs, by the Irish artist Alice Maher, and this has got me thinking of how to bring Nature into my work in a symbolic way. my garden is full of bare twigs at the moment; dogwood is looking particularly sculptural.

native dogwood; the twigs are a wonderful red colour.

I found an old bag of Southern Ice porcelain (from china clay mined in New Zealand) in just the right condition to be spread over the stoneware clay with a knife – a beautiful surface to impress into.

the twigs embed into it deeply and rupture the slab of clay as it is bent round to make the roughly cylindrical shapes. further bending for an oval base is impossible as the clay is still soft, and won’t support independent upright pieces. ( at this time of year there is not much dry in the air and I tend to work with the clay in a softer condition than in warmer weather).

some enthusiasm, and adaptation of working method to to the sticky and slightly floppy  material produced a flurry of new pieces.

softer shapes with more flow to them ..

and at the end, using up cut out pieces which were too small to make a curved wall pot produced a softly rectangular vessel.

this is not quite new; a long long time ago I was strictly rectangular, but this is much softer, and quite exciting. more to come!