Sgraffito Tile

Artist Statement

"Portuguese Man O' War - A Jellyfish Above and Below The Waves" is a piece that was inspired by the natural shape of the clay slab I used. As I began the piece, the rough edged, oblong shape stood out to me. This encouraged me to make a design using the natural shape. I liked the long dangling tentacles of the Portuguese Man O’ War, and thought that they would fit nicely into the shape. This piece was something that I used to help improve my technical skills, and experience sgraffito, so there is not much symbolism behind the piece. I did, however, want to capture a little bit of the natural beauty that the Portuguese Man O’ War embodies. This jellyfish is unique in that part of it is above the water, which intrigued me. It was because of this that I wanted to create a contrast between the “above water” and “below water” parts.

This work was made on a clay slab. The slab was simply a piece of clay that had been underglazed and dried, but not yet fired. I used a variety of carving tools to dig into the hardened clay, and scrape away my design. The glaze that I used was pure black, which helped to give some of the contrast that I was interested in. Specifically between the white and the black; the scraped away, and the untouched areas.

This piece started with choosing a slab to work with. I chose one with a unique shape, as I figured that that would be more interesting to play around with, in regards to space. I then came up with a design on paper, which was then transferred to Scratchboard. I did many tries on the paper, because I could not decide on an idea to follow through with. On the scratchboard I finalized where I wanted my negative and positive spaces to be. I then carved out my design in the actual clay, and added some details that I hadn’t had before. I added a fish, and gave the piece more background, by adding rocks in. These were fun to create because of the texture that they had. If I were to remake this piece, I would add much more background, and ocean life around the Jellyfish.