vases

Second Raku Workshop - Copper Glazes Edition

I decided to try copper glazes again, but with some wild cards thrown in - I experimented more with unglazed negative spaces, and tested out some different types of glaze.

This first piece has “Midnight Luster” glaze on the interior and a lithium carbonate glaze on the exterior. It’s quite attractive in photo, but it did suffer from a bit of pitting, meaning the glaze pooled in some spots and it bubbled and hardened in ways that are suboptimal; instead of a smooth surface, there are rougher points within.

This next piece is interesting in that I had intended it to be a more standard bowl, but in the bisque firing process its sidewall accidentally got damaged and it was involuntarily edited into the shape it has now. I sanded it down a bit and decided to move forward with it; I can imagine that the cavity might improve accessibility to whatever is stored within!

I was pretty proud of this platter as a handbuilt piece, but unfortunately though it made it through the bisque firing unscathed it was unable to handle the temperature fluctuations of the raku firing and it sustained a crack across about 2/3 of its base. It is not salable now, but I still wanted to share the piece with you!

Finally, here is the most experimental piece of the metallic batch - I used both “Emerald Copper” glaze and a thinned out crackle glaze to create the exterior dripping decoration, and used “Midnight Luster” on the interior. The bottom of the exterior is just the result of carbon trapping in unglazed raku clay.

More Ceramics!

In my last ceramics blog post, I shared a range of planters I’ve created. (When I use the term “planter” for my own ceramic work, I am specifying that I have crafted them with drainage holes. I haven’t done so yet, but if I were to create a piece without drainage holes to house a plant, I’d call it a “cache pot.”)

I am most interested in making planters because of my extensive plant collection, so I’d say that for every non-planter piece I make, I make four planters. But I have made other pieces, including vases and bowls! Here are a few examples. The three vases all make use of my experimental embedding of iron oxide chunks, so they’re glazed in a “clear” that appears as a transparent tan.