Well here’s a throwback for ya! Way back to what I think was my senior year of high school, so either 2002 or 2003, depending on which semester. Also entirely possible it was actually the year before that, I’m not 100% sure. It came up to my thigh and barely fit in the kiln. My art teacher, Mrs. Wimmer, had these slides made for me (yep, slides. Look it up, kids.. 🤣 I’m honestly a little surprised that was still customary in the early 2000s). I only just now had them digitized, and had to do some massive color correcting, which was not entirely the fault of the slides. * sigh * They still look a little off, but I did my best.
A year or two before this, when we were learning to make a coil pot, I was feeling impatient with the rolling, the scoring, the slipping, the smoothing, repeat, repeat, repeat... I started grabbing small wads of clay and smooshing them together, leaving heavy texture on the outside, and smoothing everything together on the inside. “Does this still count as a coil pot?”, I asked Mrs. Wimmer.
“Sure!”
Awesome. This felt much faster, and had texture! OooooOoOoooh! I made a pitcher, and a tiny cup to match. It was heavy and clunky, and my mom loved it. She still has it.
Eventually that “coil” method morphed into me flattening out bits of clay and squeezing them together, then gradually stacking those bits on top of one another as I smoothed down the inside to connect them all and form a vessel. I did it to make hair for a bust project, (my sister in law still has that one. One of the family dogs used to growl at it as it walked past) and then finally one of my pots just kept getting bigger, so I just kept going, working within the hour-or-so increments of a high school art class. I’d spray it down and wrap it up at the end of the day, and continue the next day, for what I feel like was months, but I don’t know how accurate that perception is.
I went back to this technique off and on in college. One of my first “biomorphic” coil pots used the same method, and I raku fired it (risky biznis!). Mom has that one too, and I actually still really like it. I’d like to make another now that I have the means to raku again.
This texture has refined a bit since this high school pot, and I don’t use it often, but it is a part of this vase I recently made.
Now when I use it, it’s on top of a form I’ve already constructed instead of also serving as the means of construction, and I take care to make sure none of the petal-like bits would be easily snapped if handled.
That huge, shaggy teal vase from high school was given to the mother of a former long-term boyfriend in 2014. I had moved with it across the country twice at that point. Many of those jagged edges had gotten snapped off, and I was about ready to be done with the thing. Or at least hide it in the garage or something. But she loved it, and I was glad to give it a home. I have no idea if she kept it after I was no longer with her son.
I don’t really have a sweeping conclusion to all this. It’s just nice having such an early documentation of my work that shows a starting point to such a continuous thread for me, and thought I’d share it. I would like to show more of this sort of timeline soon, because I love when you can see such clear evolution in someone’s work. I’m always fascinated to see it in others, and it can be helpful to show that ideas don’t just get pulled out of thin air. I’m thinking of making it a video (a sort of artist talk) but that’s always a lot of work, so we’ll see.