so i made a porcelain spine
and here it is hanging in the hallway for critique last week
wip pics and project notes below!
The goal of this piece was to invoke Russian Gzhel-like patterns on porcelain vertebrae (porcelain was the best option in lieu of white earthenware) with electric blue underglaze. To fulfill the 'process' requirement of this process sculpture assignment, I used sodium silicate to induce surface cracking while they were still leather-hard.
First three vertebrae constructed:
The shapes are of course not exactly anatomically correct, mostly due to time constraints but also due to lower initial expectations for the project. If I were able to change anything about this project, it would be the accuracy of these forms. But then again, abstracted roughness seems to be a running theme with all of my school work.
Crack-inducing sodium silicate added alongside electric blue underglaze Gzhel-like patterns:
The underglaze patterns were similarly roughly applied, forming a kind of abstracted impression of Gzhel without being nearly as detailed or meticulous. It's this abstraction of heritage that I've focused on for my capstone, which you'll see more of in the coming week or so.
Glaze fired and set up in preparation for weaving in the yarn:
Funny enough this was my first time doing pretty much anything with yarn, first time braiding anything since maybe when I was a kid lol. Very pleasantly surprised that it worked out as well as it did!
Though the assignment was to make a sculpture with a process as the central focus, I instead wanted to mainly focus on this spine and Gzhel imagery. At the time, there was about a week or two before I had to accompany my dad for his fairly intense back surgery across the country. To say it was on my mind would be a understatement, and really the whole month of March was filled with intense anxiety around this surgery. Luckily, the operation went well and there were no trip complications, and he seems to be recovering as well as expected so far. That anxiety has since mostly died down, but this random ceramics assignment still holds a lot of significance for me. Between my dad and me I feel like I've had to have back-related issues in my mind for my entire life, and getting to express some of that anxiety in a fragile set of porcelain suspended against gravity has been good.
