Throwing progress: Feb 2020
6th Feb. Adding grey slip to recently-thrown forms. In the two at the forefront, the wide bowl contrasts with the simple ring foot. Reflecting on their silhouette, it lacks the clarity and simplicity I would like to achieve at this stage in my making.
Behind is a slightly larger thrown bowl. When finishing it, I was sure it was simply too large to rightfully be called a teabowl. This raises the question of how we can define a teabowl in terms of size and scale. I have started trying to pin down this question in my ‘defining the teabowl’ blog entry.
8th Feb. Making a taller-footed teabowl. Using a Xiem Foot-shaper + Mudtools ‘Do-All’ tool, I roughly shaped the profile of the foot on the hump. I wasn’t able to stop the clay burring, but it created a good shape of foot to work with.
9th-11th Feb. Two teabowls thrown on the 9th + turned on the 10th. assessing the form + silhouette from different angles; experimenting with how each feels in the hand.
12th-18th Feb. Throwing a series of slightly wider bowls. The slope up of these bowls is wider and gentler (particularly apparent in the one on the far right in the image opposite), creating a “fuller” form. They are reminiscent of some chawan seen in Hagi ware.
I used these to particularly experiment with the finishing of the foot-ring.
Opposite: I originally used my Giffin Grip to turn flat ring-type foot-rings on these bowls. However, when assessing them once completed, I felt that in the neatness of this finish, the forms somehow lost something. I decided to try redoing them using carving, hoping that doing so would give the bowls a more tactile quality.
19th-22nd Feb. Here, I was trying to make some bowls with a more purely conical form - unlike the upright bowls I’d made before, the silhouettes of the bowls here have only a hint of a curve to them.