One of my favorite things about art is creating work based on things that I am passionate about. There are many times where I have to create a project but I have little inspiration and my creativity battery is on low. When this happens I tend to try and think about things that really make an impact on my life and see if I can make something based on that idea. For this semester’s ceramics class that I am taking, I have chosen one topic to base all of my work on. This topic is about women, women empowerment, and how society treats and sees women. This is a very special topic for me because I consider myself a feminist and a woman’s woman. I believe that women should be looked more highly upon and treated fairly in society considering that today’s society treats us as if we are less significant to others. Due to how I feel about this topic I have started to create ceramic pieces that question society’s boundaries between women and what we deserve.
Now that I have an idea about what I want to create, I have also decided to hand-build all of my work. I want to hand build because I personally enjoy it more and I find the wheel to be a bit difficult. Even though I usually try to learn more about things that I find difficult, I have chosen not to this time because I want to make sure I get it just right.
The first piece that I have started to work on is a vase. I am using a simple cylinder shape for the base and I am crafting delicate female figures around the entire piece. The images of the female figures were inspired by gesture figure drawings that I created a couple of semesters ago when I was taking a figure drawing class. I enjoyed how sketchy the figures came out and I also liked how because they were gesture drawings, there were multiple on a page, they were all over the place and not perfect, and they were all different poses of the body.
Seeing this on paper, my professor and I thought, “How cool would it be if these figures were imprinted on the clay?” So that’s exactly what I did. I drew similar female figures out onto clay, formed them into the vase, and went back to carve and clean up the drawings. I think they came out pretty nicely and I really enjoyed seeing this style on a different medium. Now that I have carved the images on, I am going to wait for the vase to dry to then go back in, clean it up a little more, and have it fired. Once it is fired I will glaze it. I have yet to decide how I want to go about glazing this piece but I do have the ideas of either keeping it all one color or making the vase one color and the figures different from the vase. I am excited to test out these ideas. After the vase, I plan to create other crockery such as a cup, bowl, and plate with the same or very similar technique. I am excited to see how all of my work will come together at the end of this semester.