Artist Inspired Project

The assignment was to choose a ceramic artist and using skills learned over the semester create something. I chose to work with slabs. The artist I chose is named Geoffrey Pagen, he usually works on a bigger scale than I chose to. Pagen focus on geometric shapes and nature when creating his slabs, I kind of focused on this when decorating mine. To make these I used clay, a slab roller, a hair dryer, a needle tool, glazes and the kiln.

Each of these tiles show a lot of color and defined lines made with the needle tool and change of color. There is texture from the clay and contrast with the different shapes and colors. These tiles started as a lump of clay which I then turned into a slab, using the roller. After the lump became a slab I used a ruler to get straight edges, for some of them, and to make a few of them similar in size. Once I cut out the shapes I wanted I used a hair dryer to help the drying time decrease, when they reached leather hard I used a needle tool to carve into them. They dried out before being bisque fired, after the bisque firing I used an assortment of glazes (listed below each) to put the finishing touches on them.

Pagen is typically inspired by nature so I chose to go with that, for the most part. The second tile is an abstract landscape with the shapes and colors. The third and fourth tiles go together and are glazed with blues, it reminds me of a foggy day over the ocean. These relate to my life because I chose how to relate them to nature and I created them. I love nature and think it's really interesting to capture its beauty in simple ways. I struggled with coming up with ideas, to overcome these struggles I looked at pictures from nature and at geometric shapes/patterns for inspiration. Something that bothers me on all of them is that the glaze didn't reach the carved out lines and they are left white. In the future when I'm glazing I will try and use a small brush to get to these lines or I will put more glaze over them and hope it melts down. My favorite tile is the one with the mountain like shape