Finishing my forms and reflection on this unit

This week I have been creating my chimney forms and also experimenting more with surface texture, sgraffito, oxides and glazes on their surfaces.

I have really enjoyed experimenting with different textures and creating a variety of sizes and shapes for my forms.

I feel that my recent forms, made in ivory stoneware clay with sgraffito on their surfaces, have been very successful as I really like the contrast between the intricacy and the preciseness of the sgraffito drawings and the randomly distributed textures across the surface of the forms.

After looking at my test tiles in my previous blog post I decided that I wanted to create different surfaces, textures and colours across my forms using glazes oxides and coloured slips. Therefore this week I have also been experimenting with applying oxides and glazes to some of my pieces.

I feel that my key motivations for this unit were to explore using the images from the industrial revolution and to experiment with how I could transfer these images onto clay. I also wanted to experiment with how I could evoke feeling from my pieces much like how I felt very strongly when I looked at these images.

During this unit I have discovered that I really enjoy working in ceramics as I was never sure before whether I should focus on ceramics or metal. I feel that my ideas and designs best fit ceramics as it allows me to explore surface pattern (which in this unit I have discovered I am very interested in and would like to explore in the future)and texture and create forms I would find it hard to do in metal.

I researched this project thoroughly from the start and feel that this enabled me to realise what it was about the industrial revolution that fascinated me and what I wanted to explore. I feel that I planned my time well and therefore made the most of all my time in the workshops.

I found that both my individual tutorials but especially the group tutorials helped me greatly as by listening to everyone else talk about their work it enabled me to see how they needed to improve. Therefore it made it clearer to me and easier for me to understand what I needed to do to progress when talking about my own work. I feel that I really developed my self-analysis in this project and I am now more confident in analysing my own work and reflecting on how I could improve it.

I do however feel that I need to improve on my reflective writing as I’ve found it difficult in this unit to get straight to the point in my blog posts and not be too descriptive.