Notes on Making and Working, Ceramic
Notes on Making and Working, Ceramic
October 12, 2022
Ceramic Building / Making
My ceramic works comingle the ethea and aesthetics of traditional ceramic forming with those of assemblage, carpentry, construction and tailoring—embracing basic methods of pinching, coiling, and slab-building with the clay, while also incorporating stacked, interlocking, and other more mechanical-type connections, with the finished works ultimately “glued” together by fired glaze. Prior to glazing, the pieces are often loose and rattly, and in some instances can be disassembled like puzzles.
While I love the plasticity and the fusibility of clay, which are central to most processes of building and forming clay objects, and I exploit these properties at every moment in the studio, I think the ways in which I build are much more like the ways of a carpenter, a mason, a framer, a sheet metal worker, a plumber, a welder, a bricoleur, a baker, and a butcher all rolled into one.
More than anything, I liken the way I handle clay to tailoring. The works are constructed mostly of clay slabs in a process balancing additive and reductive steps not unlike the way a tailor handles cloth. And in fact, because the scale I tend to work in is within the scale range of the body, and because I work in the studio mostly with the central masses of my forms within the height zone of the torso of a standing figure, once I have roughed out the chassis of a form, even if it is a form I don’t find particularly figurative, as I reach around the forms and drape and position slabs, often using pinching much like pinning and stitching, the activity to me feels very much like a fitting.
Chris Royer, a fashion collector, archivist and historian who early in her career was among the “Halstonette” models who worked with Halston, said of the couturier’s relationship to his material, “fabric to Halston was like clay to a sculptor.” As a sculptor, I find myself wanting to work with clay the way a couturier works with fabric.
My building process has two main phases: first additive, stacking and layering it all up and joining it all together, and then subtractive with a great deal of material removed with knives and other tools. After that, there’s an additional back-and-forth of additive and subtractive moves.
Often, I first construct what is a kind of chassis and let it get pretty firm, or leather-hard, or even dry, or sometimes even bisque-fired, and then I make further interventions and additions. Differing degrees of shrinkage among components has to be factored into these additions and interventions.
Studio Manufacture / Infrastructure
Most people are introduced to clay in a home, school, or studio setting. The first time I can remember holding clay in my hand, I was not yet five years old, sitting at a little table that my father, who was trying to babysit and work at the same time, had set up in his factory between a shuttle kiln the size of a panel truck and a pug mill so big that once, while playing hide and seek, my father hid inside it.
All of my experience with clay was framed within my relationship with my dad and the ceramics industry he was part of. So while almost everything I produce is one-of-a-kind in nature, the approaches I take are often derived from the knowledge of or underlying logic of ceramic manufacturing.
I do a lot of gearing up, or what I call creating infrastructure. At the university where I teach, in addition to time in the studio, I spend a lot of time in the woodshop and metal shop, and sometimes the CNC-milling, 3D-printing, and laser-cutting facilities, doing prep work for my activities in the clay studio. It’s become a kind of shorthand when other faculty or technicians ask me what I’m working on that I just say “infrastructure.” Sometimes this can get ridiculous, and can result in research and development rabbit holes of time spent on optimizing how to do or make something I may only do or make once. In the immediate sense, the efficiency trade-off often doesn’t pencil out—all the R&D, all this gearing up—but I’ve come to understand that it’s how I tick, and it’s part of an overall process that engages my rational mind in very specific ways that serve more intuitive and spontaneous opportunities and approaches as I’m making.
Sometimes I have an idea about a kind of form I want to make or an approach to building that I want to explore, and then I do a lot of R&D and gearing up, and by the time I’m done with all that, I’ve moved on to new formal or technical problems, and so my new infrastructure gets shelved, but often along the way, I’ve figured out ways to take the original underlying formal and technical problems even further only as a result of working out the infrastructure. And more often than not, the shelved infrastructure later comes off the shelf to support a new application, just like when I repurpose tools I find in the world around me. I’ll make a tool that doesn’t already exist because I need it for a specific purpose, and then wind up using it for another purpose that also doesn’t have an applicable, pre-existing tool.
Studio Conditions
I put a lot of effort into establishing specific studio conditions, no doubt more than is necessary. It can become a distraction, but it’s part of how and where the work gets made, and after a lifetime of watching factories and facilities and studios getting geared up, and playing a role in some of that, it’s hard for me to do any different in my own space.
My work areas are set up with containers, racks, and boards covered in magnetic tool holders, which to me are kind of like the effects pedal boards guitarists use in concert, so all of my hand tools are always in reach when I’m working.
Though it can be really disruptive to the practice, I think it’s generally true that anytime when I’m working on something and I wish I had a certain tool, or wish that something had been set up differently in the studio, things grind to a halt and nothing else gets made until that matter is resolved.
More recently I’ve put a lot of effort into the development of ergonomic equipment and body-friendly processes for working in ceramics—essential to an artist who is growing older, mostly works solo, and produces heavy, awkward, fragile objects—at various stages of constructing, drying, glazing, and firing, each of which comes with its physical risks to both the art and its maker.
Rigging
Though I work with clay of all consistencies from liquid slip to super stiff, nearly hard clay, I most love working with squishy clay. I like to work freely with my hands. I work with and against gravity, enjoying the forms and the implications that come with sagging and slumping, and also facing the challenges gravity poses to clay. So behind the fairly quick and spontaneous approach to building, there are multiple systems that I’ve developed, which I employ in various combinations, to keep the construction moving up off the table as I build. These include retractable armatures that are built into the work but that can then be disassembled and withdrawn after construction, exoskeletal and scaffolding structures that get built up around the works quickly as I go, simple buttressing and corseting systems to prevent lower portions of large, soft constructions from bulging or blowing out under the compression of ongoing building above, and banding that functions in relation to the anatomy of the sculpture, similar to how wraps or “sports tape” or compression sleeves provide support for bodies. All of this is removed as the clay firms up.