Project Starting Points and Contextual and Professional Research Findings So Far

So far in this project I have visited The Bluecoat Display Centre, The Royal Exchange, The Craft and Design Centre, Flow Gallery, Vessel, the Contemporary Ceramics Centre and Contemporary Applied Arts. Out of these galleries the place where I think my work is most suited to be shown at in the future is Flow Gallery or the Contemporary Ceramics Centre. My work is concerned with surface decoration and texture and I feel the target audience for my work would be people who wanted to buy my pieces as decoration for their homes. The ceramicists I saw in Flow Gallery and in the Contemporary Ceramics Centre had work that I feel sits close to my practice.

I have chosen Vessel as my project title as I would like to make vessels with my designs and textures decorating their surface. I have chosen reflect as my research starting point as I am very interested in everyday life and buildings you see on a daily basis. These buildings may not be the most aesthetically pleasing but I want to use them to create images that are beautiful. I have chosen Flow Gallery as the destination for my work as it exhibits high end contemporary ceramics and this what I aspire my work to be in the future.

Here are a few photos I've taken of buildings so far.

Currently my key motivating factors are exploring line quality in my drawings and also experimenting with layering to create new and more interesting images. I’m interested in trying to capture a stillness in my drawings and am really inspired by the work of George Shaw. With these images I create I plan to experiment with how I can disrupt the image only enabling the viewer to see parts of the drawings by using textures and layers. These textures and layers will be inspired by things I’ve noticed when walking around urban environments such as scaffolding, windows, drain covers.

Here are some of George Shaw's paintings I really like.

I am interested in working with ceramics and intend to create slab built vessels which will have lines, layers and textures on their surfaces. In this project I intend to experiment with sgraffito, relief printing, paper resist and mono printing to transfer my images onto the clay’s surface.

I went to the Ceramic Print workshop on Monday and found this very useful as we learnt how to monoprint and use decal transfers. I feel learning how to use monoprinting will come in very useful in this project as I liked the lines created by drawing onto the tissue paper and the varying lines that can be created by using a pen or a blunter pencil. I also feel that learning about decal transfers will come in useful as you can layer these up over already fired images so I can produce more layers to the designs on my vessels.

Here are some images of my experimentations in monoprinting.

Here is an image of one of the decal transfers I made.

I am also planning to go to the ‘Ceramic Surface’ workshop as I feel this will aid me greatly in this project, I am also going to go to the basic photography induction to improve my photography skills and to the kiln firing workshop so I can learn how to pack and fire a kiln for bisuit and glaze ware myself.

For the rest of this week and next week I am going to carry on experimenting with drawing from the pictures I’ve taken and experimenting with line quality in these drawings and how I can use layering to disrupt the images I produce with lines and textures.