Visual research: glaze & surface texture

I have decided to make this page to draw together particular things which have textural qualities or colours I would be interested in exploring with glazes. I will log primary research on here in the form of found natural objects and my own photos over recent months. The latter being the case, there will be some overlap here with my ongoing photojournal project - but here I will be pulling out specific images and analysing in more detail why they appeal to me and what specific elements I would be interested in exploring.

I hope that this page will help to clarify what it is that draws me to want to explore certain types of surfaces - what natural phenomena I would like their tactile qualities to suggest. I anticipate that the research saved here may be more wide-ranging than I will be able to fully develop as glazes within the necessary time constraints of the MA, but feel it will be useful to set up as an ongoing record for future work.

My description/analysis should pop up when you hover an image with your cursor.

You can also find the records of my ongoing glaze testing on this portfolio page.

Sunrise in the early hours of the morning (May 2021). The warm dawn light over the horizon has a luminous richness, whilst the sky above is hazy with clouds. The striking conditions could be echoed with a buttery shino or a misty semi-transparent glaze over a darker buff or toasted body.

A carpet of fallen cherry blossom (taken late March 2021). Evocative of the transience and impermanence of things, this photograph also appeals to mean because of the way the fallen blossom seems to transform into a formless haze of colour - delicate pink shading to pinkish-white, specked with rosy orange and yellowy-green.

Photo of streaks of rain on frosted glass on a chill March morning. Through the frosted pane the details of the scene are indistinct; all that penetrates is the pale morning light. Though very simple, as in image it is powerfully evocative of the late-winter morning. The interaction between the surface of the glass and the light/space it half-reveals, half-obscures, is of great interest to me. (NB: Koren identifies things ‘obscure’, ‘murky’, or ‘indistinct’ - ‘things emerging from, or returning to, nothingness’ - as characteristic of wabi-sabi.) I would like to find ways to create glaze + body combinations which yield a similar sense of depth obscured/partially glimpsed beneath the surface.

Striking sky at dusk (early June, 2021). The light of the setting sun turns clouds an almost liquid gold. Set off by the surrounding shades of orange and pink, the combination of light and colour create a deep sense of warmth. When seeing the dusk sky and photographing it, I was thinking that it is this kind of feeling of softness and warmth that I would like to create through my combination of glaze and body.

An assortment of small smooth pebbles ranging from light grey to charcoal/almost black, collected from Lyme Regis in 2019. I collected these because the gradation of tones interested me, as well as how over time the sea had worn the pebbles so smooth, creating a wonderfully tactile surface. In particular I find the surface of the darkest pebbles interesting - whilst as matt as the others, their darker colour means they can nevertheless catch a glimmer of strong directional light. This interesting contradictory quality is something I would be interested in exploring with charcoal-black stoneware glazes in black or off-black.

Snow falling, uncharacteristically late, in early March 2021. The large snowflakes and bare branches of trees seem to almost dissolve in the luminous winter light. When digitally editing this image I added a cool colour filter, enhancing the blue tones, to try to better capture the chill, sparse quality of the snowy morning. Like much of my favourite photography over the winter, the image has a quality of immateriality that seems to me evocative of ma ‘s ‘formless beauty’.

Three flat pebbles from Lyme Regis in mottled buff/off-white. Their colour, smoothness, and almost-symmetrical oval shapes give them - when considered as discrete objects - a feeling that combines naturalness and purity. It was with this aesthetic quality in mind that earlier in the course, I ordered Valentines Arctic White stoneware body to experiment with. By late March 2021, I’d decided that its pure-whiteness when fired actually makes it unsuitable for the natural aesthetic I wish to evoke. Similarly, early basic feldspar-dolomite white glazes I mixed in late 2020 proved far too “sterile” feeling - static, lacking in any depth or dramatic quality. I remain interested in the possibility of off-white glazes (though not so much bodies), but am keen if/when pursuing further to find ones suitable for reduction firing and with much more dramatic irregularities. Meanwhile, these pebbles perhaps remain more interesting to me as reference in thinking about the texture rather than colour of fired bodies - do I want to find a body that vitrifies? Many hagi ware teabowls do seem to have that vitrified quality to the clay, left visible on the foot beneath the brushed-on glaze.