Hands - The Most Effective Tool in Ceramics.

Recently I have had a couple of sessions in the ceramics workshop to help me get to grips with the materials, techniques and important safety notices that I have to understand so that I can begin making my salt cellar. From these sessions I have learnt that in ceramics, hands are your greatest tool.

Hazards and Safety in the Workshops:

Before I run through some of the techniques and processes I've been learning, I think it is important to take a moment to highlight some key hazards that anyone should be aware of when working with ceramics. A LOT of clays contain silica dust. This dust is extremely harmful to the lungs and can cause several respiratory diseases. For this reason food and drink is not usually permitted in the workshops, but anyone who does wish to drink water at regular intervals should use a screw cap bottle and should always wash their hands beforehand. Be aware of this if you do any ceramics work of your own.

Now that is out of the way, here is some of the techniques I have been learning:

Coiling:

The clay I have been using is buff clay, perfect for making stoneware, and it is one of the more common materials used within the workshop.

I began by learning the process of coiling. The clue is in the name, for this process you create long tubes of clay and coil them around a base to begin creating walls. This is particularly useful for creating pots , vases and other hollow objects. It is important to use water, modelling tools and your fingers to blend the coils together to create smooth walls and improve the structural integrity. While this technique appears simple, I assure you that at times it is not as easy as it may seem. At multiple points I found that I really struggled to roll an even cylinder of clay! However, once I did have my coils the latter half of the process was far easier.

We didn't have an awful lot of time, but I spent most of mine trying to create the neatest pot that I could. Of course this was all for nought as our creations had to be destroyed afterwards!

Slabbing:

The second process was slabbing. Slabs of clay are created by rolling clay out on a piece of cloth using a rolling pin and wooden guides. This process is used to create even slabs that can then be used to build bases and walls for ceramic projects that require a little more precision. Slabbing allows you to measure your clay pieces out beforehand and use a ruler, it can also be useful when creating hollow cylinders.

Slabs and other shapes formed from clay can be joined by using water and a toothbrush to create rough surfaces on the areas of clay that are going to be pushed together. I joined my coiled pot with my slabbed cylinder below using this method.

Plaster Moulds:

Finally, I also got a chance to experiment with plaster moulds which allow you to form clay into a specific shape such as a bowl or half a sphere. Awkwardly I tore straight through two clay slabs that I made when trying to fit them to a spherical mould. This is due to the fact that I would try to stretch the clay across the mould rather than placing the clay inside of the mould. Luckily, with a little repair work, I managed to achieve half a sphere!

Hopefully these techniques will come in useful when creating my salt cellar. I have already began experimenting more with slab building and using it to create a model that will be in many ways similar to my final design.

This design is a little bulky and not as delicate as I would like, so I will roll out thinner slabs in future and make sure that my walls do not flare on the edges where they have been cut.

Thank you for reading and keeping up with my project. In my next entry I hope to show some more design work from my sketchbook, and I should be experimenting with firing in the kilns as well as using glazes very soon!

See you later!

- Sam

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Email me: samsantsant@outlook.com