Throwing IV with Roger Kerslake.

Course outline: The development of advanced throwing skills including the creation of enclosed forms, and centering and throwing large amounts of clay will be the focus of this course. Students will develop the skills required to make more complex lids that are well crafted, good fitting, functional and appropriate. Skill development will be continued in order to duplicate pottery forms to create sets and related multiples. New forms will be created by altering and reassembling thrown sections. The techniques and skills of creating, decorating and glazing will be applied to finish work appropriately, mindful of attention to details and the principles of functionality, design and aesthetics.

Roger Kerslake. A very nice teacher with lots of humour who is very precise, specific, patient and has constructive feedback. He shows us beautiful pieces. Teapots, big bowls, plates, handles, spouts, and all thrown clean and with style. We have to combine throwing and hand building together and our class goes nuts. We make great stuff. Some a bit far fetched and Christine the only one who has definitely found her niche, but we all have fun and create something special. He shows us handles, decoration technique’s, knobs, cool slides and painting on ceramics.

His finishing is an art on its own. Just to look at him while he is working is fun. I am in trance while he uses the tip of his pinky to finish a rim and by the way he holds and uses his ribs. He is comfortable with all sizes and while telling us English stories and jokes, he demonstrates a lot in our week. I am having a great time. He is an amazing teacher and I am impressed by his way of working. We combine wet and leather hard pieces, make 3 piece vases and wine jars. We stick leather hard with leather hard together with some slip and scoring and have to stand up because the pieces are getting higher and higher. Helen is in her element. Finally! She is making big, beautiful & bold pieces. Her creativity has been hit and she makes dancing wine goblets & funky lamp shades. The colourful decorations from Wayne are still in her mind and the pieces are starting to fit together. I sit across from her and while she has been wandering around for weeks, she is now sitting down, throwing and focused as can be. I finish my wine jar and am really proud.

And the lids. I am the lid-lady. I love everything about them. Making, forming, shaping, trimming, glazing and finally taking them of and putting them back on the pieces they fit (or don’t fit) when they are glazed. with the amount of different lids Roger showed us it is going to take me a year to practice and get them all right. This is too cool. Instead of throwing a chunk of clay and trimming it to death, I am now throwing lids. You might not get my excitement. For me, it was the icing on the already perfect cake. There is too much to tell you about what we learned. Roger shared with us not just all his knowledge about ceramics, but he also showed us how you can put something from yourself in your piece. It was an amazing week, and I am hoping that his path will cross mine again sometime in life. Because one week with Roger was not enough.

Glaze technology with Michael Sheba.

Course outline: we will develop the skills and knowledge necessary to work with percentage and unity formulas so that the glazes can be analyzed, compared, altered, new glazes formulated, and glaze faults identified and corrected. The characteristics and choice of raw materials and their role will be studied using line blends and other testing methods to create various effects mindful of health and safety issues.

We meet with Michael again. He has already prepared us for this week when he was teaching us hand-building. He told us it was going to be a very difficult and intense week. The tone is set. Our class has mixed feelings about it. Some are really excited and can’t wait to learn more about the glazes, the technology and the chemistry behind it all. Others just want blue out of a bucket and don’t necessarily want to know how it got to be that colour. We have to work in teams, and I am partnered with Ruth. This has some advantage and some disadvantage. The advantage for me is that she is really into it, and wants to know every little tiny bit there is, chemistry wise & technology wise. She is eager to learn, to investigate and to do research and she understands most of it. The disadvantage is that she wants to know EVERYTHING about it. I don't share her enthousiasm. Fluxes, stabilizers, I am not really interested. Obviously she doesn’t have an advantage of having me as a partner.

I am also not having a good week, because someone who I felt really close to passed away this weekend and now I want to be at home. Where everybody knows me and where I can talk about how I feel. So if we get green, purple or blue, I don’t really care.

I am lucky that I know a bit about computers, now at least I don’t feel so overwhelmed by the program (Insight) we have to use. Michael is very excited about it all and he has a lot of knowledge about the subject. He loses my attention in the first 5 minutes, but then, I didn’t really give him a chance. It reminds me a bit of at home where Gary, one of the people in our guild, patiently explains about opacifiers and glass formers.

We do line blends and colour respond tests. We get crowded in the glaze room and dust up a storm. I am the only one with a proper mask, and feel that the school should have required from all of us to have one. The flimsy white ones don’t help much, and some people are already not wearing them. The glaze room is also connected with our studio without a door, so the glazes settle in the studio as well as in the glaze room. Not that healthy. After we have all finally done our test we all get to pick our dream glaze and have to find the right recipe. If you find a nice one right away, Michael will adjust it so it is not perfect anymore and you have to fix it. We start working on the computer and the program sort of does it all. Ruth is typing away putting in one test after the other, and I am reading her the amounts of silica, frit and nephsy we should use.

I understand the idea behind it., but our first crackle glaze turns out very nicely and after testing 8 more, the end result is that #1 was the nicest. Some of my classmates are very upset. 3 days later the supposedly red glaze is still god awful brown and the nice turquoise transparent glaze is not very transparent and they are staring at the scale, wondering why this is happening. They feel stuck and frustrated and don’t really know what they’re doing. Others are happy as a clam. They are adjusting chemicals, reading up on stabilizers and find out why some fluxes work better than others. Our class is split in half for the first time and when our week is over, we have some happy, some confused, some frustrated & some indifferent students.

Me, I just want to go home, crawl into bed and cry for a while. I miss home and I don’t care which colour my uneven bowls will turn.