Small Plaque - The Long Journey to Completion

A long time ago (in fact almost exactly two years ago!) I made a small stoneware plaque. At the time I was inspired by a tree motif in a series of illustrations and paintings I was working on. You can read the blog post here. Even then I mentioned I wasn’t sure how I was going to glaze the finished piece. So I put it aside to think about. Since then, although the plaque was subsequently bisque fired, the poor thing sat in a drawer for ages waiting patiently for me to decide.

In one incarnation I planned to raku fire the plaque using a simple white crackle glaze for the background and either glazing the tree green or leaving it carbon black. But believe it or not, despite all the raku firings in the past couple of years, there simply wasn’t room or time between raku orders and stock replacement for me to pop the plaque into the kiln! Unfortunately the poor thing wasn’t a priority in all the flame and sawdust, so it never happened.

My next plan was to reduction fire the piece using a gas kiln. I thought about using a white or clear glaze with wax resist on the tree to highlight the design, creating a speckled effect under the glaze and a dark toasted brown on the unglazed areas. But then, would you believe it, the gas kiln broke! In fact the gas kiln was out of action for many months last year for various reasons. It all began with a misfire caused by a power cut (the controls and safety switch are electric) which plunged the pottery studio into darkness, wheels spinning slowly to a stop. Let’s just say this event ‘coincided’ with the setting-up of the stage and cabling for last year’s Isle of Wight Festival...(!) Anyway, yet again, poor little plaque didn’t get glazed.

Then a couple of months ago I found the forgotten little plaque wrapped in tissue in a drawer; bisque fired but looking quite forlorn. So I made a decision: stick to something simple! I used a mixture of oxides (iron, cobalt and manganese oxides in equal parts) and brushed this into the tree design, wiping back with a damp sponge. Then I took a wide flat brush loaded with plain white glaze and simply ‘swiped’ over the top. Done! Fired in an electric kiln in oxidation and finished at last! You can see the different stages of making – from painting to finished plaque – in the photos at the top of the post. What the photos don’t show is the complicated, logistically chaotic and random stuff that sometimes goes on in the background when you try to made decisions about glazing!

Tree Motif: from Paint to Plaque

(Tree motif in acrylics and translated into clay plaque.)

Mad as a March hare; that’s what it’s been like these past two weeks. March always seems full of birthdays (including my own) which is partly why it’s been a while since I’ve blogged. But in between opening presents or sending them in the post I’ve managed to make quite a few pots.

Since making my teapot I’ve made 4 jars with lids, 4 mugs, 4 salt and pepper bowls, 4 small jugs, 4 large jugs, 2 napkin rings, 2 coasters, 1 incense burner, countless buttons and a small plaque. Some of these are part of an order but the plaque was something I stumbled across when I had a bit of clay left over at the end of the day. Usually I try to use all the clay I’ve prepared during a making session and create a least something however tiny or odd rather than just chucking the leftovers in the reclaim bucket. So I was on the point of making some buttons out of it when instead I decided to do some ‘doodling’.

As is usually the case with these things, I had a huge amount of fun scratching away at the leatherhard clay trying out little designs and re-working them until I finally decided on the ‘tree’ design shown in the photo above. The plaque is only small – not much bigger than a credit card size and deliberately uneven around the edges; in fact it retains the same shape and size of the original piece of clay left over - except for some smoothing. It’s made from stoneware and on the reverse I added a small lug so a piece of wire or twine can be threaded through the hole in the back for hanging.

The design itself is a motif I’ve used before in some of my paintings: and a detail of one example can be seen on the left in the photo above. This painting was from a series of designs inspired by autumn colour – hence the lovely intense orange. It’s a mixed media painting on watercolour grade paper using acrylics and pastels. It’s more of a reference piece rather than a finished work - but the design translates to clay extremely well I think. Of course my next dilemma is how to glaze this piece. Unlike the painting – where the motif and colour are one and the same – I now have to decide whether to glaze in one single colour, letting the motif show through, or follow the motif with coloured glazes. Decisions, decisions.