Thursday 19 April 2012

Curved clay

This piece was produced upon the same principle as that in 'Landscaping clay'. However I found that joining the strips of clay to a surface interfered with the works fluidity and so decided to focus on manipulating a piece of clay, creating smooth waves and dunes within the surface.
Nov/Dec 2011, Fired clay, Approx. 35cm x35cm

Wednesday 18 April 2012

Are leaves made of paper . . .?

Each leaf shape is formed from a stack of paper. The basic concept is that the shape cut from each layer is a window allowing site as to what is below, the window slowly decreases as more detail is introduced layer by layer. The first detail cut would the skeleton of the leaf which increases in size and length until it reaches the outer perimetre of the leaf shape. The veins are then cut braching out to one another again slowly decreasing the window until there is no shape to be seen through. The remaining shapes cut out are restacked to form a paper leaf.
Approx. 5cm x 5cm x 1.5cm (depth)(above) Approx. 10cm x 12cm x 0.7cm (depth)(below)
This piece was constructed from found packaging materials, each roughly A4 in size (21cm x 29.5cm). Instead of decreasing the shape of the leaf in order to introduce detail, the size was kept the same and rotated slightly through every layer.
November 2011 Each leaf varies in size.

Landscaping clay

Following on from a twist of clay, I have begun to introduce the small strips of twisted clay into a landscape. As singular pieces they are too small and insignificant but in creating an environment for them to overlap and intersect they arouse more interest.
November 2011 Fired clay (differnt images of same piece) approx. 40cm x 25cm

Monday 16 April 2012

Monoprints

Still exploring leaves and ways of depicting them. Each of these prints involved the use of Zest it - a non txic cleaning fluid, generally used for the cleaning of oil based printing inks. In this case I used it to remove certain areas of the ink on the printing plate that resulted in the skeleton leaf shapes below.
This second print involved not only the use of zest it but also pieces of thin paper (news print paper) to prevent the transferance of the ink from plate to canvas when put through the press.
each print 21cm x 29cm (A4) October 2011

Saturday 7 April 2012

A twist of clay

November 2011 Preliminary experiments; Manipulated strips of clay treated with iron oxide and fired in the kiln. Each strip 2.5cm (width) x 1cm (depth)
The idea behind this series of development is to explore the possibility of creating a geometric shape that can twist and curve. In doing so the form then challenges the characteristics that define them as originally being geometric shapes.