Rough Ideas: pottery: June 2010 Archives

slip decoration workshop at hood college frederick maryland

By Catherine White on June 30, 2010 9:55 PM | 1 Comment

Catherine White Slip Decoration Workshop at Hood College
July 17-18, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.
July 17, 6-9 p.m.

The weekend course is an exploration in the vocabulary of slips applied to clay forms. The class will be both demonstration and hands-on work. Saturday and Sunday sessions will be amplified with an evening slide talk of personal work and historical references. Assignments will explore the poetic potential of texture, line, pattern and color variations. The class will weave together the implications of brushwork, additive and subtractive applications, and the interaction of form, glaze and fire. Assignments will cover experiments with varied techniques.

Bring leather hard plates, bowls and vases plus clay to roll out slabs to experiment on.

ARTS 599 Slip Decoration
July 17-18, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.
July 17, 6-9 p.m.
Instructor: Catherine White

Hood College Frederick Maryland

http://www.hood.edu/academics/departments.cfm?pid=departments_ceramicsWorkshops.html

Workshop Fee : $185
1 credit/Graduate Tuition:$360
to register call Karen Taylor at 301-696-3526

first tomatoes

By Catherine White on June 29, 2010 6:58 PM | No Comments

June 29th the first tomatoes were a great treat with lunch.

summer solstice #10 2010

By Catherine White on June 10, 2010 1:58 PM | No Comments

A year ago now I was just finishing up the wet work phase for the wood kiln. We had an afternoon thunderstorm so I quit to go to the house and watch the rain and clouds blow through. I drew a group of bottles on a window sill to focus my attention on the next batch of small vases for the back of the kiln some of which are pictured below.

This morning I have finished making things for the glaze kiln and after a session of weeding and picking flowers, Zoe returned from a run and headed to the pond. With the dog in tow I grabbed my towel and followed her inspiration. The pond was refreshingly cool and floating with eyes at water level I looked at the trees and sky like a water particle or a thought slipping from past to present swims, stroking on to future possible swims.

"Maybe it is simply because the body is about 70 percent water, but swimming in a river confers a sense of intimacy with the natural world that isn't easy to come by. And if you feel you own a little piece of this river, there is also something in the way the real estate of the water slips through your hands that persuades you that the river owns a bit of you as well. It is a fluid exchange. Intimacy with the river, like other kinds of intimacy, is laced with ambiguity, with questions of ownership elusive and variable. And it becomes an easy thing to imagine yourself a particle in the river's continuity, so easy, in fact, that you begin to see things the way the river might see them. And you see, then, how that continuity can be reassuring. You somehow go through life to a certain point always thinking that even if you can't exactly start over, at least you can fix things or change them and that all the missteps and wrong directions can be corrected and that it is never too late. Later you may find yourself believing that is no longer true. I looked up the river and down it. Its flow was certain, its direction unchangeable, but still it could take on the day's nuances of light, the vagaries of the shifting tide." Just Beneath the Surface, Akiko Busch

summer solstice #9 2010

By Catherine White on June 9, 2010 6:53 PM | No Comments

In 1982 when I first brought pots to the restaurant Omen as examples Mikio, the owner, had said to me, "I need large plates and bowls." I said, "Great, I love to make platters and big bowls." I brought things Mikio thought looked like bathtubs. I have learned that large is a relative term and in Japanese cuisine there is room for many tiny dishes. A large plate is 8-10 inches. Earlier in the year we sent pots for a photo shoot for a cookbook that Elizabeth Andoh is writing. I searched my shelves for small interesting things for plating her recipes. The challenge sparked my interest in the beauty of small contours--the interaction of food and small pot.

"Craft is about the transformation of substance; it is about the possibility
of one thing becoming another and about accepting ambiguity. And if uncertainty is a liability in the age of information, in the world of craft, it is a material reality, an opportunity, a chance." --Akiko Busch, The Ecology of Uncertainty

pottery: June 2010 Archives

slip decoration workshop at hood college frederick maryland

first tomatoes

summer solstice #10 2010

summer solstice #9 2010

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