Smash!

A view of the rejected work before it met the hammer

One of the side effects of remodeling my studio was that I cleaned out a lot of old or broken work, including a not insignificant amount of stuff I had simply forgotten about. Everything was taken out of the studio for the remodel, and before bringing anything back in, I tried to think carefully about what should and what should not come back in.

the shelves in question, cleared out and ready for new paint

The studio isn't the only place in the house where I store work. As my husband continues to move through the house remodeling room by room, he's reached the room(s) next to my studio, including the laundry room and the hallway/stairway to the basement. Along the side of the stairway there is a set of small built-in shelves where I had stored lots of small scupture, functional work and odds and ends. 

The rejected work included raku fired scupture, slip cast and thrown items, glaze faults, cracks, and partial projects that never went anywhere

As we cleared out these shelves, I discovered some stuff I had completely forgotten about, including some old work, some broken work, and some pieces that were really experiments or early attempts at various forms, surfaces, or techniques. Some of the stuff in these shelves is good work, which just needed the dust of remodeling cleared off, but other pieces got the hammer.

Video of some pieces being smashed (the first mug has no interior glaze and the second has glaze faults)

I decided to smash some of the stuff I didn't want to keep, both so that it will fit more easily in the trash, but also because it's satisfying to smash the stuff that didn't work. I'm not super concerned about people going through my trash to claim work that I meant to toss, but I suppose smashing it makes it final. I am really done with whatever this was.

the mug with the worst bubbles from the low fire clay

I still had a few pieces from the last firing with the bad mix of clays, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that most of those pieces didn't have the big bubbles of the first piece I smashed. These pieces still had some surface bubbles that make the glaze look wrong, but they didn't have the big bubbles from the low fire clay melting.

 

The bubbles visible on the mug exterior reveal air pockets when broken apart

Breaking apart the badly bubbled mug allowed me to see inside some of the bubbles. In one case I can even see a piece of differenly colored clay right where the bubble formed. These pieces wouldn't have been good for functional use, but it was interesting to see how the material acts under pressure (the pressure of being fired higher than some of the clay was designed to go).

The darker clay is a patch of another clay body embedded in the main white body

Besides this one batch of incorrectly mixed clay (I accidentally mixed low fire clay into my mid fire clay and forgot about it), the rest of work work was mostly structurally sound, if not always a success for other reasons. The earlier sculptures sometimes were overly engineered, with unnecessary internal supports. The thrown forms were sometimes thicker than what I makee now and some of the raku stuff cracked before the hammer even touched it. But most of the stuff that had to go was accidentally broken after firing or was just ugly, either becuase of the glaze or because sometimes stuff doesn't work.

another view of a bubble inside the wall

Some of the pieces actually look better in pieces. My daughter claimed some of the broken bits to try to run through her rock tumbler, though I'm not sure how well a thin glazed surface will hold up to the tumbler. The rest ended up in the trash, but will clear both physical and mental space for the stuff I'm working on now.

the remnants of the smashed work

I did make a couple of discoveries that surprised me. I had forgotten that I had first done the scream mugs quite a bit earlier than the pandemic. Back in 2018/19. I was working on these politics/protest mugs. I wasn't totally happy with either the faces or the glazes, and so I put them away. I continued working on other faces, especially screaming faces, but forgot where they had come from initially. 

 

the front and back of a 2018/19 screaming political mug

I first started making these as a reaction to the opposing sides of the political discussion screaming at each other. In face, the first screaming faces are two sides of one mug. As we moved further and further into our pandemic year + the screaming faces seems apropos of both the pandemic and the political climate of the election year. It's kind of hard to remember when screaming in anger or frustration wasn't the mood of the time.