College – Term 5 – Final Ceramics Piece

Posted on 21st June 2013 by perfectly4med

This piece from last term won’t be exhibited at my end of course show next week, so now it’s been fired and assembled, I thought I’d share it with you here 🙂

The brief was to create a ‘Cornell style box’ (i.e. an assemblage) based on my chosen collection, which, for last term, was beads. The base and top were scaled up from a metal filigree bead, with the top flowers being formed from a mould made using lucite beads. The hanging flowers were sliced from a clay extrusion using my own custom laser-cut perspex die and then individually hand carved and pierced. The clay used was earthstone which goes cream/white when fired, and I decided to keep it unglazed.

The filigree section was formed by sticking down D-shaped extrusions to form the pattern, using slip, and then I used a fine potter’s knife to cut out the enclosed sections. This obviously took the most time! Just as the box was finished, I managed to drop it – a gut-wrenching moment, but happily not much got damaged and the clay was still soft enough to work out the kinks. After that, I was a lot more careful!

College – Textiles – Term 4 – Final Project

Posted on 23rd December 2012 by perfectly4med

The choice of final project in textiles was to either design and make three tea towels, an apron or a Cornell-style fine art box. I followed my ceramics theme and chose the box, and thus embarked on a project to include every technique I could think of to transfer my patterns from my sketchbook to my ‘panoply of patterns’. Here’s the completed box, complete with my display sheets displaying its contents:

Lots of techniques in here, from free hand drawing with a fabric gel pen, to free motion machine stitching, backstitch hand embroidery, iron on transfers, applique, fabric paint and quilting to name but a few…

College Course – Ceramics – Term 4 – Final Project

Posted on 23rd December 2012 by perfectly4med

For our final project this term, we’ve had four weeks to work on either a ceramic bird house, or a Cornell-style box. In principle, we had to slab build the box and then use at least two of the techniques we’d learnt to decorate it. I’ve gone for the Cornell-style fine art box:

Once again, all the work is based on my bead or button collection – the filigree is the back slab layered with D-shaped extrusions and then pierced (two techniques already!). The flowers are one and two part plaster moulds taken from other beads (sprig moulds, technique three). The box will dry over the Christmas break and then get fired – it’s white earthstone, and we’ll be playing with glazes next term. The box will hold vertical strings of ceramic beads, which I made by designing my own extrusion die, slicing this into uniform thicknesses, piercing and then carving (and there’s technique four):