My Clay

I’ve worked with many different clay bodies in my pottery journey over the years, mainly stoneware bodies. These fire to quite a high temperature (1200⁰C -1300⁰C), being in between earthenware firing temperatures (1100 - 1200⁰C) and porcelain (1300 ⁰C and above). I like stoneware because it is durable for everyday use, meaning it doesn’t chip quite so easily as earthenware, and more often than not, it becomes vitrified in the firings. This means that it becomes like stone, with the glaze and the clay melding together to not let water in.

 White stoneware clay bodies give a good colour response for slips and glazes and buff coloured ones often develop a deeper colour in the finished piece after it has been fired. I have had endless problems with buff ones blistering in the final firings when slips are added to them and so this problem has curtailed this line of enquiry. However, I like using an off white body, or a flecked body for my Midsummer collection. It gives it a bright, summery feel, just right for imagining sitting in my garden on a warm Summer’s day.

 Recently I have found a dark grey clay body which is good to throw with, doesn’t mind me adding a slip and fires without problem to a stoneware temperature. I particularly like that it really shows off the white slip brush marks that are layered over the top of the clay as the slip and clay body contrast well together. Throwing with it is slightly tricky as it’s heading towards being very plastic, just like porcelain is. However, I can manage that, and so it’s definitely a keeper.

 Just as a watercolour artist uses special paper and paints, I use clay. The clay is my material, the medium with which I work and so I want to be able to show what can be done with it, bringing the qualities of the clay to the fore. So then my pots are not just a pot with nice decoration, but the pot and its surface (decoration included) are the whole of what I want to express.

 I trained and practiced for a number of years in psychology, and so often my thinking turns from pottery to psychology, somehow finding a link between the two. In this instance, this line of thinking makes me think of the concept of Gestalt - “something such as a structure or experience that, when considered as a whole, has qualities that are more than the total of all its parts” (Cambridge Dictionary, online).