Waves Upon the Shore : 9298A

 9298A, Waves Upon the Shore, cone 7, fired for three days and cooled for 1 day, 1998.

Mossy Green - 9998C

9998C, Mossy Green, 1998

When this platter first emerged from the firing, after cooling for four days, the fluid glaze I had expected to find a rich glossy red... had cooled to this lovely matte green. The rivulets and crystals had had so much extra time to cool and coalesce. Just enough of the glaze had overlapped the edge of the rim of the platter, pulling the black slip and drawing the cobalt and chrome and copper into the very edge of the main glaze... giving it an almost blue fade.

Unexpected, most definitely, but certainly not unwelcome.

Untitled - 11298A

11298A - Untitled

 This platter turned out so differently from what I expected. To this day, I still dont really understand how the white under the pink/purple/red came into being. My original design had this turning out matte orange, with a pale blue green underneath it. I think the three day firing and crash cooling may have had something to do with the results.

If you can come up with a groovy name for this platter, I want to hear it!

Nailing Jello to the Wall - 11799B

Nailing Jello to the Wall, 11799B, 1999

This platter was glazed on one of those nights where I was definitely burning the candle at both ends. Never mind that my ex-wife and I were fighting non-stop... so being home wasn't worth being there for... and never mind the strife in the studio.... I just kept right on glazing. Sometimes I would glaze for two to three days, non-stop. Would load one kiln and get it rolling after days of glazing, and completely forget what I had put into the kiln. Then I would resort to my glaze notebooks which looked like sick mixed with coffee stains (I dont drink coffee)....covered in dry glaze powder. And I wonder why some of my glaze ideas turned out completely backwards. Yeah... I was my own worst enemy as I worked on these platters. Once in while, they resulted in some fantastic colors and textures... other times, not so much. Of the dozen platters that went into this firing, only two survived and of those, only this one made it to NY.

Much Too Much - 23098A

Much Too Much - 23098A, 1998, fired to cone 8 over 2 days, and cooled for two days.

What To Do? (42398A)

Oasis Amidst the Wasteland (42398A), 1998 

I have been getting lots of inquiries lately as to why my writing about these platters has dropped off recently. There is a short answer and a long one.
The short answer is that I don't have it in me to write more at the moment.

The long answer is harder. It takes time for me to shape. And it hurts.

These platters came into being at a time in my life when I was finishing grad school in Utah. I felt like my whole life was in front of me. I was starting to apply for professorships all over the country. My daughter was almost two and a half years old. I could see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Yep, it was a train. At some point I will try to put into words what that train wreck was like. At this point, the part that matters most is the emotional content these platters still carry for me. I can't see them through other people's eyes. I certainly don't want anyone to see them for what I saw them for.

But after having been boxed up for more than a decade, seeing them out of their crates, in the daylight or under the strobes in the photo studio... it is a whole new experience. While I remember all that went into making them (right down to the feeling of mixing up the glazes and the texture of the slurry through my hands as I glazed these big monsters)... but also the emotions that filled my mind as I was making the series.

In retrospect, it wasn't the beginning of a whole new world as much as it was the end of one. I just didn't know that then.

82598A - Frozen Puddles Cracking in the Baking Sun

Whenever these platters are exhibited, I get scores of questions relating to the technical nature of the glazes. Ironically, that is NOT what these are about. At first they were ALL about the technical. As I got farther into the research, they became emotional canvases for me to express the profound relationships I saw between materials and temperature. Yeah, that sounds like total bullshit. I know. My professor thought so too. I don't really give a shit anymore. What I learned was tremendous. Things that I assumed to be absolute truths are in fact very lazy observations. Conservative and optimistic assumptions. By discarding those assumptions I was treated to a completely new experience... in glaze. 

One thing I wish I had been able to experiment with (and maybe some day it will happen) is trying to get these glazes OFF the clay surface. Seems counter to the concept of how pottery works. Imagine these disks of color, suspended in front of a glass wall.... no opaque clay behind the surface.... just letting light pour through the cracks and thin translucent areas. It would be fantastic! I was never able to explore the idea of creating a releasing agent to free them from their clay frame. Definitely something I would love to see some day.

Frozen Waves, Caught in the Act - 87981

There was a brief period of about three months, where as I made these platters, I combed my fingers across the bottoms of the form as I was throwing. Some of these waves ended up looking like the ripples in the sand that is often seen at the seashore after the tide recedes. Lovely ripples and pools of glaze quickly following the ebb and flow of heat and melt.

I am often asked how I see these platters. Do I see them completed before I begin making them? Not even close. Because so much of the process was so disjointed, I would often be glazing a platter I had thrown months earlier. In many cases, the glazing process was happening with glazes I hadn't even dreamed up back when I began throwing the form that they would eventually meld with.

Melting in the Summer Sun - 101698G

Holes in the Sea - 93098A

This is another one of those platters that exceeded my expectations by first disappointing me, then frustrating me, until finally revealing something so amazing as to be sublime. Go figure.

Looking at the glazed surface now, you would have no idea that this platter had a very textured and rippled bottom surface. It appeared much like a tidal sandbar after the tide had pulled out. My plan was to glaze it with some opalescent blues and purples... expecting to see tons of depth and ripples. Yeah.... that didn't work out so well.

After a 16 hour firing and a 22 hour cooling, the unctuous opalescent glaze turned more matte, and bubbled. BUBBLED !!! DAMNIT! For over a week I considered giving this platter the business end of the hammer. One day, a fellow potter sat in my studio, dutifully popping the blistered surface as though he was popping zits in front of the mirror. No shame, no fear... just pop pop pop... and suddenly... WOW.

He looked up and asked if I had looked at the glazed surface UNDER the blisters. I allowed as how I had not, and immediately was wowed. Once we popped the majority of the remaining blisters, there was still an incredibly sharp edge to contend with,... and the last thing I wanted was to injure someone who wanted to buy this platter. So we took many MANY sheets of wet-dry sandpaper, and basically polished the entire surface. In the process, the blisters became almost like air bubbles, moving through water.

At my exhibition, this was usually the last platter than anyone noticed. It doesn't scream with color or patterns. Once it was discovered, people would linger, point... and sometimes, reach out to touch. In the end, I think this was one of the most successful of all the platters I made that year. Surprise!