porcelain and Pears

The work I do is almost always in porcelain, I’ve flirted with other clays but I’ve always come back to what the teacher and artist Antoniette Badenhorst has described as the ‘diva’. I’m drawn to it’s whiteness, the feel of it, the velvety smooth texture of leather hard like baby's cheek, the wobble tofu of it wet, the way it fuses like glass once it’s fired, and then of course its strength, translucency and whiteness. I also love the history of it from Japanese and Chinese ceramics to the pottery of Serves and Stoke on Trent. 

But it’s not without its challenges as a clay. It’s tricky. Nothing is simple or easy. You go to use it and it’s too hard to work with, so you add some water and wait a few minutes. You go back, it's a sloppy mess, slipping and sliding all over the place and impossible to work with.. It reminds me of a pear; you go to eat it and it’s rock hard and impossible to eat, so you wait a while...then the next time you pick it up it’s a slushy mush. Like a pear porcelain has a very brief sweet spot when it’s perfect to use and the trick is to know when that is.

It also has a memory, I was taught to hand build at secondary school, coiling quickly and then whacking the pot into the shape with a paddle. You can’t be doing that with porcelain, I’ve tried and I have a lot of cracks appearing during firing or drying where the clay has remembered it’s rough treatment and is not going to forget it, thank you very much. If you don’t treat porcelain with the utmost respect throughout the making process and drying process it's going to hold on to it’s mistreatment and then cracks... everywhere. 

But I love it. The moment I picked it up in the first year of my degree I was hooked - love at first sight. At college porcelain was too expensive to buy so I made my own, tweaking the recipe to add more strength and adding paper pulp to make it more translucent. When I came back to ceramics I started off with stoneware, then to a semi-porcelain but it just wasn’t the same and I soon graduated to working with it again.

So the last 2 years have been me trying to master it’s subtleties and quirks.  There is so much I’ve forgotten, it’s been slow going but what I’ve learnt is that it can’t be rushed. When I coil I take it at a snail's pace -  which kind of works as I only work on my pots in the evenings - so one or two coils an evening then I let it rest and go back to it the next night for a couple more coils. Anything more and things start to go all floppy and lose their form.

Occasionally I cheat on porcelain and use a bit of birch white stoneware - particularly if i’m trying out a new shape or I want to make something large. Then I marvel at how quickly I can make a vessel and how easy it is to work with. But it doesn’t have the risk and high stakes of porcelain and I can’t stay away from it for long. I love the raw clay so much and always get a thrill when I touch the surface of it and that’s what ceramics is all about isn’t it - the relationship you have and your hand have to a material and how you respond to it.

In ceramics, working motherTags porcelain, handbuliding