Respond and Confront

For this project, we were assigned to take a stand about something that we feel strongly about and create a ceramic response to it. I decided to focus on the topic of how people think that money buys happiness and how that is completely false. To represent this topic, I chose to make the top half of a woman whose skin is made of money. Her eyes are coins and her hair is flat sheets of dollar bills. I wanted her to look sad to represent that money doesn't make you happy. I began by making the body from the shoulders up. I did this by making coils and sticking them together. When I finished making the coil body, I make a nose and attached it to the face. Then I scratched eyes onto it. I noticed that the clay was becoming really dry, so I had to work fast in order for everything to come out smoothly. Next, I began the hair. I made the hair by making a slab and attaching it on, then I used a needle tool to texturize it. I tried my best to make the hair look really natural, and I think I did a pretty good job with that. When I was finished with the hair, Mr. A and I realized that the eyes kind of looked like an after thought on the piece, so we decided to just get rid of them all together. I just smoothed out the clay in that area and got rid of the eyes. Next, I had to decide how I wanted to incorporate text or numbers onto my piece. My piece is revolved around how money doesn't cause true happiness, so I knew I wanted to do something with the money symbol or dollar bills. I realized that with the time we had, it would be easiest to just make little dollar signs and cents signs all over the shoulders. After I did this, it was ready to be bisque fired. After it was bisque fired, I started to glaze it. For the head, I used a leaf green under glaze to make it look like money. For the hair, I used a potter's choice metallic gold glaze. After it was fired, I really liked how the colors came out. Overall, the finish product came out really well.