ANOTHER HUMP DAY

 

I just started a new cycle on Monday dedicated to terra cotta after having cleaned up the studio and prepared a group of slips over the weekend. I will be making carved tebori, falling leaves, abstrakt resist and black and white slip pieces for several galleries and two (?) shows which will be made up of primarily thrown pieces with a handfull of molded forms to fill out the groupings. I don't tend to make too many pieces using molds but honestly slump and hump molds do come in handy for some forms that are just to labor intensive to throw and alter and I have added oval, square and rectangular tray/plate pieces to my repertoire which fits quite nicely with the thrown pots. Illustrated is a square plate on and off a hump mold, after the form has been fine tuned, I covered the piece in black slip and will wait again until it is firm enough to carve. If I start early enough in the day and have the right music on the cd-player I can usually get four square plates made during the course of the day with the intervals of dealing with them filled with throwing, tooling and decorating (carving or slip work) making the whole process flow rather smoothly even if it is another hump day.

Postscript; Terra Cotta and humidity just don't mix and at the very least are certainly odd bedfellows.