Week 8 - Another Busy Week

This week, I had the privilege of observing an awesome demo from former IUS post-bac Marret Metzger. She’s super inspiring to me; her work is incredible, and I really admire her journey and devotion to ceramics. I also appreciated her sharing about the economical/logistical side of living off her work. I got to talk more with her at the Southern Crossings Pottery Tour and connect with some other cool artists and friends while volunteering there for a few hours on Saturday. I also sold a couple things at the volunteer table too and got some nice feedback on my work, which is always a good feeling.

In other news, I’ve gotten several interviews for summer opportunities over the past week — things are looking promising there. I’m now chugging away at applications for year-long opportunities due at the end of the week and month.

In the studio, I finished sculpting two baseless forms that I plan to slow bisque and potentially throw in the soda I plan to fire off this coming weekend.

My shino line blend came out of Little Eddie (^10 gas reduction)! There isn’t a ton of variation throughout the blend and it looks like the tiles were in different places in the kiln and got different levels of reduction. I need to look at things more closely, but as of now, I’m planning to do another blend possibly subbing redart for newman red or another red clay. I am also planning to try to develop a wood ash glaze (or slip, we will see) this week using IUS creek clay as the stabilizer. I made a handful of tester rocks to play around with that and throw into my soda. I’m not trying to be super methodical with it - just seeing what I can achieve with natural materials and my little glaze chemistry knowledge.