Tile Project

Artist Statement

For this project, we were first instructed to come up with a tile design that would work in multiple directions and create a continuous narrative of sorts when aligned with other tiles. This would then be prototyped and cast in a mold to be able to produce multiple of the exact same tiles to later glaze and present in some fashion. I decided to go with a sort of floral design, where either four individual flowers meet at the center, or individual petals come together to form one single flower. I really wanted the design to be intricate and detailed, yet also lose and flowing without appearing to be sloppy. This led me to incorporate some leaves and sort of swirling grasses or ribbons of sorts around the flowers. 

After coming up with multiple drafts and sketches of designs, I found one that I enjoyed and that would properly create continuous designs when put together with other tiles. From there, I created a to-scale paper version of a single tile, which I broke down by layers using colored pencils to determine how many slabs I would be stacking to create the depth I wanted. I then moved onto using the slab roller to create thing sheets of clay, onto which I began imprinting my design to cut out and build up to create my design in 3D. I created one original tile, out of which I created a mold using plaster. Using plastic clay pressed into the mold, scraped and formed to be just enough to fully fill it, I was able to create a number of the same tile within a short period of time. As each tile came out of the mold, I cleaned up any edges or rough patches using slip and a needle tool, and started to let the tiles dry up. Once dry, I tested a underglaze option on one tile to check the effect, which I did, and completed the rest of the tiles in the same fashion. 

While this project involved some planning and reworking to begin with when I was still coming up with my tile design, the process of actually building the tiles remained quite constant and according to plan, as once the mold was made I was essentially set on that tile. Once the tiles came out of the mold I had the ability to add onto or subtract from the tile in any manner, however I just stuck to cleaning them up to look somewhat the same and make them resemble my original tile as best I could. With the glaze, I did experiment with one underglaze design to see if I preferred a sort of drawn-on effect and if the color and amount of lines was what I wanted. Recognizing that I liked the contrast of white and black, I glazed the rest identically and covered them with an additional clear glaze. Overall, I am super pleased with how these came out, I enjoy how the design can be oriented in two manners and creates a sort of continuous crossing pattern should more than four tiles be added. I also think that the black line work, though perhaps a little more messy than I would like, accentuates the curvature of the different levels of relief, creating an overall decently successful composition and final product.