I’ll post more about my artwork in subsequent posts, but here are a few photos from the workshop on April 18! Morningside (me and Paul Adamson) brought six community members, and I also invited along a friend from a dance class I take at the Y.
It was a very cold, windy day (at the time of our arrival, it was 31°F) but I had a lot of good luck at this particular workshop and I like most of my finished pottery a lot.
It wasn’t without any bad luck, though. One of my pieces did break, and it unfortunately didn’t go quietly: it exploded while in the kiln (very unusual), sending ceramic shrapnel into several neighboring ceramics, three of which were mine. My own speculation is that I share a studio with students who often are not that careful about recycling clay with foreign material in it, so there may have been a contaminant in that clay body.
Since raku is neither food-safe nor watertight, I feel good about making repairs to surface blemishes since they don’t impact the structure or function. I Dremeled out the fragments, touched up any missing glaze, and sealed the spots with acrylic varnish. On two of the pieces the repairs are genuinely hard to find; on the third they're minor.
