Mudgoddess's Lizard Tile

Look at the beautiful tile I found! Mudgoddess has more of them, too. I admire other people's beautiful work, and can't wait to get back to the studio...

Moving the Kiln next week!

Just got word that the work crew will move the kiln from old building to new building next Tuesday...Exciting and scary at the same time! I'll go over there and take some pictures of the new space. In other news, we have a fairly intense storm going on here. This is the view out my front door. Like I say, we live in the woods. The driveway goes off to the east and finds the road about a third of a mile away....

Creating a new studio

The ceramics studio where I will teach my classes next semester is being moved from one building to another over the break. This is a huge undertaking - the building we are moving to needs extensive remodeling (ventilation, electrical service, plumbing, floor finishes) to be suitable for the hard use it will get as a pottery studio. There are better ways and less efficient ways to set up the work flow in a pottery work area. I found this nice diagram of a workable layout at Ceramic Arts Daily. The construction team is plowing ahead with little input from the people who will use the space, but it is fun to think about where I will put stuff when I actually get to start furnishing the space...

End of the Semester, Continues...

My students made their self-actualization presentations in Introductory Psychology today. Creative products, reconnecting with family, introspection and self-evaluation - these were the main themes. Heart felt songs, quilts and blankies for loved ones, chocolate cookies for the class,scrapbooks of pictures new and old, posters about quitting smoking, working out, and teaching puppies to roll over - all just wonderful. One woman read a poem she had written. Mp3s of drumming practice, mashups of hip hop samples, doodles and sketches turned into tattoos - so many hidden talents tucked away behind the sleepy faces... They seemed happy to do it, even the ones who were nervous. People don't get much of a chance to show themselves.

Sold a Pot!

The local Potter's Guild held a Christmas sale in a couple venues in the downtown area, and someone actually bought one of my pots - a nicely balanced 9 inch tall vase with a very dark shiny brown glaze. I'm so happy! Sorry I don't have a pic of it....

End of the Semester Some More

I have spent the morning entering grades for my two big Psychology classes. The students have done well, worked hard and most of them have learned something. Hopefully they will feel satisfied with the grades they have earned. This is part of why I like teaching the ceramics classes so much more than the psychology. In the pottery classes, the students get immediate feedback from the clay about how they are doing - how closely their skills and their ability to conceptualize coordinate with one another. In psychology it is much less clear to the students that having a firm opinion about an idea or a theory is not the same thing as understanding the theory clearly. Plus, in the psychology classes this semester I had much more of a problem with cheating than I usually do, so I am just not giving grades on some of the materials that they handed in. So, we will have to see how that goes....

The End of the Semester

The best laid plans, etc etc! The semester is almost over - my ceramics students learned a lot and made some wonderful objects. I interacted with a lot of psychology students and definitely over-committed myself with those doubled up classes. The students learned a lot and so did I, so will do better organizing my time next semester. :-) Now, trying to wrap up this semester, and think about the break - focus on the farm, family and dharma for a while....(not necessarily in that order!) I have also discovered Twitter! I'm there as meredifay...

Teaching Bliss

The fall semester at the community college starts on August 18. I just checked my rosters. I am teaching 2 sections of the 4 credit Introductory Psychology, both of which are overloaded with 43 students each at this point. My supervisor asked me yesterday if he could double me up and give me 90 students in each of those classes. The more the merrier, I guess. We'll see how many more actually sign up! One section is Mon/Wed morning for two hours, the other section is Tues/Thurs morning for two hours. He says he'll try to get me some more money for doing this, which would be nice. For the Tuesday evening Ceramics class I will be teaching, there are three people signed up so far. I should look up the difference between "Ceramics" and "Pottery", since I think of what we will be doing as pottery rather than ceramics. Ceramics to me has the association of slip cast Halloween ghosts with faces from "The Scream" and Easter bunnies glazed with Cone 04 'magic crystal' glazes that make little runs of green and yellow through the pink base color. Not that I am totally offended by kitsch, but that is not what I am going to teach my students! Guess it's time to start thinking about syllabi - syllabuses?- and course assignment lists. The beginning of a new semester is always fun - so many possibilities! Next Thursday, I am going to do a little barrel smoke firing with my friend, Julia. So, before then I need to make a few coil pots and pinch pots to put in the barrel. Busy, busy, busy....

High Fire fire.....

The Cone 5 firing came out very nicely. One pot had a glaze than ran a lot, but it was fortunately placed one of the kiln shelves that had been most recently and thickly covered with kiln wash, so it did exactly what it is supposed to. The glaze ran onto the kiln shelf, but as the shelf cooled, the pot just popped loose from the shelf, so the owner of that pot can just grind down the glaze edge, and the pot looked great. All the pots look great - I think it is a very successful kiln. Once again, credit to the students who worked carefully to create successful pots. I'll post a couple pictures in a minute here. My celadon glazes dragonfly bowls and cups look great. The experimental Coyote Clay shino glazes are all also very nice.

Low fire fire....

Here's the low fire kiln, just opened - it's still pretty warm in there, but the student pieces turned out well. The students in the summer class were a good group, with all showing talent in some area or another. Many had an eye for color, as can be seen here. I did some glaze experiments with abandoned student pots from a few semesters ago, and started up the Cone 5 firing. Didn't get it started until 12:15, so I am going to wait until Thursday to go in and unload it - I know it will take longer to cool than the Cone 05 kiln did. After spending so many years doing therapy, part of why pottery is so satisfying to me is simply the concrete products that are the result of all that work. When the kiln is unloaded, there is the result - pieces you can hold in your hand, and see immediately if the pot is intact, if the handles are firmly attached, if the glaze melted the way you planned, and the overall effect is pleasing and centered, or out of balance in some way. See how I use the same vocabulary I used to in therapy, but now applied to tangible bits of burned earth and colored glass, instead of to people's subjective internal experience and objective presentation to the world? My lama would tell me I am analyzing too much, again. It's all just celebratory display of the unitary awareness that is existence in this moment, and I need to analyze less and love more. "Love this world" the lama says. I believe I will make a pot with that on it.

Pots and Fire

Friday I ran a bisque kiln, fired to Cone 05, at the community college, and I unloaded it today. A couple of students had made thick pots, but I was assured the clay was well wedged and the pots had been drying for a month, so I put them in the kiln reluctantly.

I opened the kiln this morning to find that three pots really exploded, and two others had large pieces of the thickened areas flake off. I'm sorry I didn't take a picture - most of the pots that broke were on the top shelf of the kiln and it really made a mess. Fortunately, no pots made by other students were damaged by the ones that broke. This is a good experience for me - when I am teaching next semester, I will have this immediate information to emphasize and enforce the "Skillful potters make thin-walled pots, and only thin-walled pots get fired!" rule.

I then loaded the kiln with low-fire glazed ware, and am now firing the kiln to Cone 06. I had reservations about some of these pots also - I washed the bottoms of a couple of them which had raw glaze smeared on them, and stilted several of them. Hopefully it will all come out ok. We are very low on kiln furniture - need to order a wider variety of stilts and props.

Tomorrow, I will unload the low-fire ware, and run a Cone 6 kiln. I will take pictures of the unloading and reloading process.

This whole process is satisfying to me in a very basic way. Here is a picture of one of my favorite pots that I have made since starting doing pottery again. This pot has Cone 5 glazes on it, but I think it got over-fired a bit - the normally stable grey glaze on the base of the pot got more runny and shiny than usual. You can see one of the fat little drips. I like that effect when I get it on purpose, but accidently, it is a puzzle.

Anti Pots

A year ago, I signed up for the ceramics course at the community college where I was teaching criminal justice psychology and psychology classes. I found I still loved it, so this is become a focus of my time and attention, since I have such a strong aesthetic response to the process as well as the products.

These two pots are part of a series of pieces I worked on last semester, addressing the question - how much clay can one take away and still call a pot a pot?

It was great fun cutting up these pots after they had gotten to that nice leather hard stage of drying.

These both still look like pots, even though they aren’t going to hold any water….

Nice dust catchers, as my mamma would call them. They will hold a candle and spill out light in an interesting way. Putting the one with the strips missing on a revolving tray and watching it turn around and around is an entertaining little experience.

The instructor for the class is going on sabbatical and asked me to teach the pottery classes while he is gone. Such delight!

Pots and Bliss

This fall I will be teaching a Ceramics course at a community college. I have loved making pots every since I took a pottery class at a community rec center in the early '80's. After years of being a therapist and teaching psychology, I have the opportunity to teach this ceramics class! This is like a dream come true. This blog is an opportunity to document my foray into arts and crafts, and relate it to some other interests - psychology, Buddhism, sustainable agriculture, as well as the creative process in general.