(Post by Kay)
The drama of the week occurred on Monday morning upon arriving in a state of high expectation with 4 kilns to open after glaze firings. This is the moment most ceramists anticipate above all else. Also I have never had the luxury of having 4 kilns before (one is a new acquisition) so that was exciting in itself. Another common aspect of ceramics is to always expect that anything could have happened in the kiln. And this time there were a few surprises!
The previous week, I mixed up 25 new glazes to test and selected about half of them, and new glazes are bound to be unpredictable. Two of them turned out to be extremely runny and welded the ceramics on to the kiln shelves! So I lost about 6 shelves. Hmm. Frustrating, especially as that didn’t happen with the test firings. The other main problem was that one kiln didn’t fire properly and failed to reach top temperature, so the whole firing had to go back into a different kiln, which took me up to the absolute last minute of getting the work out before leaving. That emergency firing actually came out beautifully (phew!) so most of the work is useable.
In the aftermath of Monday’s events I had a major rethink about hanging the work. It’s been a constantly shifting line. My intention had been to make an installation using as many pieces as possible straight on to the wall. I have used this technique before with my Botanical Structures series. Additionally, I will mount individual pieces and some compositions on perspex. However, when it looked like the quantity of pieces was fewer, upon consulting with Joseph, I decided to mount everything on perspex and create an installation of many mounted pieces, but this new idea was too expensive to contemplate. So the compromise is to mount most of it in arrangements, individual pieces and a smaller unmounted installation. But I suppose this plan may change again once we have the work in the space….
We managed to get everything packed up on time and set off at lunchtime today. Shetland here we come!
