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.

New Year's Covid Balls

this COVID ball is not an ornament

In December I made a bunch of these COVID balls as gifts. Though they look like ornaments, that's not exactly what they are. They aren't meant to be decorative, or at least not primarily decorative.

COVID Balls with directions attached

Each COVID ball comes with instructions: 

Directions: If your 2020 has sucked, use this COVID Ball to capture and expel all the suck at the end of this year. 

1. Find the hole in the COVID Ball. Whisper all the awful things from this year into this hole. Don’t worry, whispers are small, so the ball can hold a lot. If you need to scream, the COVID ball has an automatic scream-compressor installed to be sure you can fit all your rage at 2020 inside. 

2. Once you have filled up the COVID Ball with all the yuck of 2020, find a safe space (maybe a cardboard box outside--if you are under 13, please discuss with your parents).

3. Throw the ball as hard as you can at the ground (or the interior of the cardboard box). You may choose to smash it with a hammer or other implement if you prefer. The force of the COVID ball breaking will create an interdimensional wormhole into which all the range and yuck of 2020 will be sucked, leaving only good feelings for the year 2021.

The hole

One of my friends, when she received the COVID ball, said her first reaction was to smash it, so the idea is sound. I came up with the idea this summer, in part because of the frustration that everyone feels with the pandemic and the stay at home order, and in part because I observed (and remembered) the fun of the violence and physical release that comes with smashing ceramics.

smashed ceramics this summer

In college, the clay studio had a protected kiln yard that was outside but fenced in. Next to the raku firing area was a huge pile of shards against the building wall. I can't remember if there was a literal target painted on the wall, but I do remember that the reason for the shard pile against the wall was clear: If your pot or sculpture didn't work, you threw it against the wall. And it helped.

we used a box so that we weren't cleaning up bits of sharp ceramics from the sidewalk for days

This summer, when I was clearing out stuff from my new studio, I had some work that was broken or jsut not great. I was going to throw it away, but my daughter was playing outside (with masks) with the neighbor girls, so I decided to let them have some fun. I put the pieces in a box and gave the girls a hammer and let them go to town.

bisque fired COVID balls awaiting glaze

I hadn't exactly forgotten about making these during the summer and fall, but something happened to a friend in December that reinforced my motivation as I pictured her pouring her frustrations into the ball and then smashing.

Glaze fired COVID balls awaiting directions

I really enjoyed making the COVID balls, even though I didn't start until the second week of the quarter (when I got my pug mill and my reclaim clay was super soft and nice). The forms are pretty familiar to me, as I made many similar forms in graduate school and for my MFA show. I suppose I haven't made exactly this in quite a while, but making them felt like home.

Work from my MFA show in 2006

I honestly made these with the idea that folks would smash them. As I made them, I had several people in mind, including my nieces and nephew who've experienced this pandemic from a different perspective than have adults and might be more willing to smash things. But I also knew that people might really want to smash these with a hammer (even if it might feel good), so I added alternate directions that might make people feel ok with their urge to keep the COVID ball.

Alternate Directions: If your 2020 has been excellent, I suppose you can hang this up as a memento of the year. If you choose to combine the alternate directions with step 1 of the regular directions, the scream-compressor also works as a rage and yuck magnet to hold the negativity inside, preventing it from escaping into next year.

The balls on the bottom have some chunky old bits of underglaze on them

It's interesting, though, to make something with the intention that it be destroyed. I chose my colors to be loud and garish, and maybe a bit gross, too. I used some chartreuse underglaze, but mixed in some other scrap greens. In fact, on a few of the pieces the underglaze was chunky and instead of fixing it, I painted on the chunks. After I took the pieces out of the kiln, I realized that those chunks of underglaze made a gross kind of rough surface that really seemed appropriate for the diseased forms themselves.

COVID Balls with directions awaiting packing

I also thought seriously about trying to make a batch of these to sell for Christmas/New Year's gifts. As it was, I made about 26 of these as gifts for close friends and family and that was plenty. However, I enjoyed making them, so maybe I'll take orders or plan to make some for later in the year or next winter. I'd love to think that by December of next year we'll all be past the pandemic and not in need of cathardic destruction, but as far as I can understand, we'll only be getting to an end-point in late fall if all goes well. And as much as we'd like to feel otherwise at the start of the year, 2021 is going to feel a lot like 2020 for some time.

I Broke A Pot

During a glazing demonstration this week I broke a pot. It simply slipped out of my hands and smashed on the floor.

I really wanted to "quote" an image from Ai Wei Wei here, but I felt too conflicted about copyright and ownership to pull an image from another source, so I quoted a video.You all know these photos are by Ai Wei Wei anyway, right?

The pot I was demonstrating with was an old friend, one I have used as an example at least twice per quarter every quarter I've taught at YVC since 2006. I figure I've shown students this pitcher and told them about its features 60 times at least.

the pot is broken

This pitcher was so perfect. It was so bad, and in so many ways. It was heavy and large and awkward, and best of all not made by anyone I knew, so whenever I talked about its shortcomings, I wasn't criticizing a real person. Not only was it perfectly bad, it was a pretty good bad pot. It was large and its walls were even, and its handle was strongly attached. It survived more than 10 years without any cracks or chips. Until this week.

I have no picture. You'll have to imagine it.

I am so sad that I broke this pot and I won't be able to pick on it in class ever again. I don't even have a photo of this piece. But, I do have video! I recorded a whole bunch of demonstrations this summer for my clay classes. The video in which I discuss handles includes this amazing pitcher to illustrate how not to fit your handle size to your pitcher.

You can see the pot in question starting at 3:32.

This pitcher's handle was too large, forcing the hand far away from the weight of the pot and it had a skinny part that make the handle look weaker than it was. But, unusually for a bad pot, the handle was well attached to the body of the pitcher. After I smashed it into roughly 20 pieces, I noticed that the handle had broken in the middle, and the pot had broken, but the handle had not broken away from the the pot.

this artist's rendering of the most important qualities of this ex-pot

Besides having this ridiculous handle that strained the wrist and caused the heavy pot to tip forward, this pot also had a badly made spout and it was glazed badly. I was using it in the glaze demonstration because of the latter issue. Much of the glaze was applied too thin, leaving the interior and bottom half of the pitcher rough and brown. The glaze that was applied more thickly was dribbled down and across the side of the pitcher. I always use this pot as an example of what happens if you tip the pot up before the glaze is dry. The glaze will not just run down the pot, it will run sideways while the pot is being tipped through 180 degrees.

via GIPHY

Why aren't there gifs of pottery breaking and pottery falling on the wheel? I'm going to have to learn how to make gifs.

The fascinating thing is, though I've made fun of this pot for years, it isn't a pot I can easily replicate. For those of us who have been throwing pots for some time, it is difficult to throw badly. But it is also  tough for a beginner to throw this large. Someone who knows how to pull handles, will naturally pull a more even handle, but someone who doesn't know how to pull handles will have trouble pulling such a large handle. This pitcher was a fascinating intersection between developed throwing skills and underdeveloped knowledge of form. I will miss this pot. I'm thinking of offering extra credit to anyone who can make me a replica that recreates the size, quality, and lack of quality of this amazing ex-pitcher.