A bit too long

This is a bit longer than I meant to leave in between posts, especially as I have thing to blog about.  I got all the pieces I made over September and early October bisque fired and are now sitting in two boxes in my kitchen awaiting glaze materials and then firing.  I went into University to get them fired as my kiln still isn't in the position or being run but hopefully it will be soon.

At the moment it is looking like we will take over the unit on the second week of November and then will be working quickly to get it open before December to start teaching and get some money into the business.  It will be a fast and furious few weeks with family helping getting it ready.

On the 25th September we went to the Wales Contemporary Craft Fair in Betws y Coed, it was a nice warm day and thankfully didn't rain on us which I am glad of,  there were a lot of other people moving through and looking around.  We didn't get as much chance to talk to other stall holders as we did in Bacup.  Following are two pictures of myself and my wife at our stall in Wales.

Our next confirmed event is the  Greenland's Farm Village as shown on the poster below.  Hopefully more news to be added soon, and I won't leave it as long in between posts again.

Now and Then

This weekend I am off to Cymru Contemporary Craft Fair in Betws y Coed, this week I have been making more plinths for the work to sit on.  Excited about going but we have an early start to get there as we are travelling all the way from here in Thornton in my friends car, packing that morning then trying to get there on time.

I went into Uni this last week to find out which supplier they user for there materials and the head of course had put up our newspaper article on the base room door which is now shared by the 3D Design Students, which is going to make everything a bit too tight for work space, I'm glad I have finished, though I miss having those steady days of working and easy access to kilns and glaze.

Recently as I have been drawing to develop some new work, I have found myself thinking of my old art school days. I only went to art school for a year, and dropped out after the first year as I was then old enough to be a mature student and had a good enough portfolio to move on to greener grass(or so I considered at the time).  I learnt a lot at art school but never  work out how to apply most of it to personal work.  I have two examples I did recently below as my old sketchbooks are in a bedding box under all my second year ceramics work.

This was an exercise we did on the first day in technical illustration we had to learn how to shade, we did shading like this on proper work later on but or course a bit more controlled using straight edges.  When I was in my second year of ceramics I was obsessed with textures and incised the clay with various textures but it never worked how I wanted it to. I also tried dripping slip, tearing pots in half and all sorts of things to create textures.

Our technician at UCLAN made some really nice textured pieces in porcelain, he would make a tall cylinder, dry it with a hot air gun apply a glip(part slip part glaze as he would put it) then stretch it out until it was a bowl.  They were really nice pieces and one of the very few things he marked as his own work.

This is a continuous line drawing, my life drawing tutor showed us these, he said he did them in art school and then used to calculate the length of the line.  He described it as taking a pencil for a walk, the pencil lines aren't supposed to ever cross or leave the page, back at school I did two or three myself in my A3 sketchbook, this one is only A4 so it would fit on my scanner and took me ages to do, I almost gave up half way through but decided to at stick at it.  I have used continuous line drawings when doing sketches of people on the bus, train  etc, which I need to do more of.

Generally I am unhappy with my level of drawing skills and have been spending a lot of time on it recently from drawing buildings, to people to anything I can when I am out and about with the little one.  My other passion asides  pottery is concept art for films, and games particullar the work of Erik Tiemens whose work is a real inspiritation behind my painterly style.  When I was at high school it was his work and that of Doug Chiang that I wanted to imitate but didn't do art and when off to University to study Chemistry which didn't challenge me how I wanted it to.

Pottery and drawing challenge me every day as I know I don't have the same natural talent for making things as I did for maths and science.

Some old pots refired to sell on

All the work in the following pictures was gas fired up to 1260C but the kiln failed to fire any higher and the glaze hadn't matured.  So it has been re-fired in Pilling by the guys down at Northern Kilns as I still haven't got my own kiln up and running.  The clay used is B17C in all the ware but the Bottles which are crank.

Tea cups, each one is around 6cm tall

Beakers around 10cm tall

Bottles 13cm tall, these were originally thrown to be raku ware but I didn't manage to get a firing

Sugar Bowl 8cm tall
I had two sugar bowls go in the firing and a teapot, the teapot lid got chipped when it was being unwrapped at Pilling so it needs a new lid.  The other sugar bowl could do with a bigger lid too.

New Designers - A London Exhibition

I went to New Designers this week, it is still on until 4pm July 4th at the Business Design Centre in Islington near the Angel subway station.  It was different to my degree show as there wasn't a way that I could sell to the public directly as there was only limited space in the van, so everything in the next few pictures was all I had with me.  It was so hot down in London that some of the things we attached to the walls fell off over night.

We were up on the balcony and took an extra board to help the whole thing seem a little more enclosed.  Our work seemed so much smaller here than it had in Preston, there were a lot of people passing by and now I am out of post cards so I am going to get some new ones printed this week.  Our technician had met with us in London and was helping us organise the space, though our head of course who was taken ill just before the degree show came down to see us on the opening night.  Kevin Millward who taught me for a few weeks finally got to see some finished work as it was just going into the kiln on the last week he was in Preston and told me which pieces of my work he liked and those bits he didn't.

Our stand was on the right hand side by the stairs that go up to the higher level, on the lower level that you can see here was filled with textiles stands, there were 80 all in all compared to the 19 ceramics and glass stands.

Hi my name is Joseph...

and I am a throwing addict... and it has been 4 weeks since I have thrown my last piece of pottery.

It has been a busy 4 weeks preparing for the show, doing some home decoration, trying to get on top of all the jobs before the baby finishes nursery.

Yesterday was spent at Uni planning what was going to London next week, whilst I was in that meeting my mum was working hard to get all the other work wrapped up so we could clear out the uni.  I now have my work in various bags and boxes.  Today I started working through a box to work out what I am going to take with me to Stanley Park on the 18th July. 

I am putting together some press packs over the next few days for the London Event.

I have started the property search for a studio again, and have looked further a field but without having the option to move there it will cost me so much more to travel there every day via the buses.

Hopefully by the end of the month I am looking to be set up as I really want to get back on that wheel.

Degree Show Opening

Last night our degree show opened, it was quite busy and had plenty of people looking around and had quite a bit of interest in my work and people wishing me well for the future and saying I should do well in my future venture.  My old tutor made it out too, and I enjoyed chatting with him about the last five years here at UCLAN.

If anyone is in the North West of England, please feel free to come and have a look around we are in Victoria Building room 015 at the Preston City Campus.

Here are some Pictures of other peoples work, I will update if I get website details

Lorry Cudmore - A moment in Time.  Slab/Mould made forms with a mixture of clay and firing techniques her work is full of texture.

Joanne Throp - She makes these amazing bottles and tea bowls that come on a slab, she has a variety of pieces as well as some that are much bigger and smaller but all based around the bottles form, all her work is Thrown on the Potters Wheel and glazed inside.

Roisin Dougherty - her work is made from paper clay, with two of the pieces having glass eyes.

Anthea Travis (my wife) - She makes these charming animals, hand-building them in a variety of ways.  The heads are play on hunting trophies

Martha Evans - her work is made on the wheel by cutting shapes into the clay and stretching them out to alter the forms into these twisted pieces.

Anna Murfin - her work is wearable sculpture, full of texture and flows over the shoulder as can be seen in the background images.

Chris Catterall - Her work is based upon animal horns and really interact well together, not something you could have just one of.

Hayley Stubbs - Porcelain paper clay shell based forms

Helen - work based on wrinkled body parts, they are made up of two layers of clay that pull and stretch away from each other helping things look even more wrinkled.

Steven Telford - They are supposed to be seats, they are crank fired up to earthenware temperature so then he could get the bright colours

We have moved

Yes that's right the blog has moved from painterlypotter.blogspot.com to joseph.redfoxpottery.com

Over the next week I hope to do a little reformating.
The Degree Show opens to the public a week today so here is a quick teaser of one of my areas in the show