Birds - Series 4

The great thing about slipcasting is once the moulds have been made (time consuming as it may be!) work can be slipcast quickly and easily, allowing the artist to experiment with different clays, stains, glazes and other techniques to create a varied and experimental body of work. I have enjoyed seeing how different my birds series can appear using different surface finishes. In this series I have simply drawn birds onto the interior of the pots, which are unglazed reduction fired porcelain. I also enjoy mixing up the arrangment of these series, giving a new perspective on the work.

Birds - Series 3, Underglaze Pencil

The porcelain slip cast vessels of the birds series have been decorated using a black underglaze pencil, informed by my work on the theme 'birds one a wire'.

Birds - Series 2

These peices were originally going to have the glazed black surface sandblasted away to create a decorated surface following the theme of birds on a wire, and informed by my sketchbook work on this subject. However, I quite liked the simplicity of the form being enhanced by the contrasting tones of the interior and exterior surfaces, and decided to leave these untouched. I think the beauty of this series lies in its purity.

Birds - Series 1, Grouped.

These images show the vessels sitting together in different arrangements, accentuating the differences between form, scale and materials.

Birds - Series 1

When sketching out initial ideas for my final project I was keen to keep my work simple and contemporary, but have a little bit of character and animation to my peices. I found that grouping vessels in a series offered potential for adding a playfulness to my work, and was inspired by the silhouettes of birds sitting on a telephone wire. Their forms are simple but the angles and spacing between them offered potential for creating a series of vessels that worked well together. This series explores shape, with blocks of colour achieved with reduction fired porcelain, black stained porcelain, and a glossy black glaze. These initial photographs show the three different finishes together. I went on to group the objects in greater numbers, photos of these to follow.