Cathedral Close

Last week I went to a private view called The Close in Art. It was a tile project which I had done last November with a group of Secondary students from 4 different schools in Hereford.

The project was a celebration of Hereford Cathedral Close which is being completely renovated. All the students took patterns and textures from the close, which formed the boarder of the mosaic. Some students worked on creating a relief tile depicting the collapse of the west end of the cathedral in 1786, and some worked on a tile showing animals grazing in the close. The central cross in the mosaic is made up from raised tiles which have architectural details of the cathedral on.

These close ups show the mosaic before the grout went in.


You can see the exhibition inside the cathedral until the 23rd May.
There is an article about the project and another picture of some finished tiles in this weeks Hereford Times.

Dinosaurs

Recently I have been working in my little boy's reception class. They wanted to make dinosaurs so I took in some boards, a big bag of red clay and a few textures. I worked with groups of 4, and I had about 30 minutes with each group. I tried to plan lots of different things to show them, but in the end found it was better to just give out the clay and let them take it in the direction which they wanted to go in. It was a lot of fun. These are a couple of the results. The top one is a mummy and baby lizard dinosaur, and the bottom one is a slide o saurus whose 'tummy is a slide'...fantastic!

tile workshop

A few weeks ago I did a tile workshop with some nursery children. I had rolled out a large slab for each of them, and they explored patterns and textures in the clay. I cut out an interesting section with my tile cutter and then they used cutters on the remaining clay which we then stuck onto the tile. After firing I painted them with one coat of brush on glaze. I learnt a lot from working with the children, and the first thing was that I didn't leave any room for them to just squelch clay.

2008 workshops

I have just had a little tidy up of the studio and thought I'd take this picture for my website as I have just put some dates for workshops up. There are two saturday courses in May and June and a weekend one in July.

teapots

I was teaching 15yr olds some slab building techniques last week. This is what the group of 4 produced in a day and a half. This included looking at contemporary teapots, design time and carving their own plaster stamps. When I was searching around for images I found that Ceramics Monthly is online including some articles from the latest issue.

workshops

I had my first one day workshop on friday. We were making dishes from one slab of clay. Templates were first designed in paper, and then sheets of clay were decorated with slips, cut to the pattern of the template, folded around and re-joined to make a dish shape.

The finished fish dish! This just needs to be bisque fired and a clear glaze added.

Patterns were painted on and then scratched into using pins. Areas were also textured.

As well as all the hard work, we all had fun and managed to drink a lot of cups of tea.