Introduction: The Development of Tonal Clays and Techniques towards new Artworks

This blog space is a platform where I want to share the story and the process development of my new project. This first blog post will be a brief introduction about the project and my intentions for the next few months.

The project titled, ‘The Development of Tonal Clays and Techniques towards new Artworks’ was just launched with the grant from the Art Council of Wales and will be concluded with an exhibition at Llantarnam Grange Art Centre, in May 2019. This project is an opportunity for me to develop new clay bodies and techniques, to create artworks which have the potential to influence the viewer’s perception in three-dimensional and two-dimensional forms.

This project is broken down into three stages:

Stage 1. Developing new clay bodies

The first stage will be focused on finding a clay body with a range of factors: stable for high firings, enough plasticity for hand-building, shrinkage, and whiteness of the base clay body. The clay body will be made from raw materials with gradual additions of black stain to get tonal variations, which will range from whites all the way to the blackest black achievable. Sets of experiments will be done to find the right clay which has the right plasticity and colour in the firing.

Stage 2. The development of techniques

New technical methods need to be tested from, hand-building, coiling and slip-casting, as well as experiments with handling and manipulating the tonal clays made during stage 1 will be developed to create new asymmetric forms as well as symmetric forms.

The building techniques will combine coils made from extruders with customized dies, at various angles and stacked together to create from simple to more complex angles and forms. Further, experiments with slip-casting will include creating cylinders and then cutting the pieces to stack them together with different tonal arrangements.

Stage 3. Refinement and creation towards the exhibition

The experiments will be tested and refined to develop the final techniques and evidence of their success will be recorded to showcase in the exhibition. The final exhibition will include all of the learning outcomes from the different stages and will be presented with accompanying documentation of the development of the artworks and techniques. The exhibition will include, photos, videos, reflections on practice, a bilingual catalogue and audio descriptions. The exhibition will conclude the project and will demonstrate the potential to develop new artworks.

So please keep an eye on this blog space and follow me on this exciting journey of tonal discovery.