Grad School: Week 10

"I'd cooked up these avatars in the soup of my ever changing self, but they were not me-they did what what i wouldn't, or couldn't do... The need to tell stories was deeply embedded in our minds and inseparable entangled with the mechanisms that generate and absorb language. Narrative imagination-and therefor fiction-was a basic evolutionary tale of survival. We processed the world by telling stories, produced human knowledge through our engagement with imagined selves."

-Aleksandar Hemon

These tiles are all new work. New material, new temperature, and a new subject matter. This is the first real effort i have put into making low-fire anything and these pieces are all in process. They will be given at least one more firing with some oxide washes, glazes, and underglazes. One thing about low-fire is the kiln does not help you out much. What you see is pretty much what you get. I am learning, and trying to make something personal and maybe even beautiful at the same time. It has been freeing to work with images off of the pot. I don't have to worry about form, food safety, glaze fit, or functionality. Hell, i could put floor wax or spray paint on these if i wanted. Making pots is a passion, but there are some days it feels like heavy set of responsibility to have to consider all the requirements of food service.
As these tiles come to completion in the next week, it has been so useful to project human emotions and situations onto animal imagery. There are a huge selection of images to work from, each loaded with their own associations. Whether it is an angry rabbit, cunning bluejay, or wounded elk, they each communicate something different. They are not exactly self-portraits. But they touch on a narrative, and that is enough right now.
for those of you wondering where the salt-fired pottery has gone, it is on the shelf waiting to be decorated and fired. In the next week or two i'll have a kiln load ready. Will the pots intersect with the tiles in any way? I'll just have to see what week 11 brings although something tells me that might be farther down the line

Thanks for reading.