clay: heath assignment

The advanced ceramics students had an assignment: to take pictures and then sketch dinnerware. I followed suit. I've made one or two cylinders with spouts, which I already given away or sold, and so I think of spouts still for my own pitchers. The lip of the spout on the left is pointy while the lip of the spout of the pitcher on the right is like a gutter downspout. I've a couple ceramic pitchers in my cupboard that had been made by my friend Patsy, and it's time to make more pitchers of my own.  I admit that I prefer the look of the gutter downspout.

 

Pitchers are so useful. I use the little ones I have to squeeze citrus juices or mix cooking sauces for mise en place, and they're darling individual sauce and gravy boats for the dinner table. 

However, I'm gonna need to watch videos on how to refine my spouts so that they pour without dribbling messily.

I still love, love, love the Echo Etched dinner plate from the Alabama Chanin collection. Just as I had hand built my own version of Heath's coupe with an exposed raw edge, I'd likewise love to make my own version of the echoing circular lines.

Whereas my coupe plate is a solid slab with no foot and a very narrow perpendicular rim with a raw exposed clay, Heath's coupe is even more minimalist at the edge with no rim, where the entire plate is a very slight bowl and which lends itself to the "serendipitous" concentric semi-hatched lines. I am wondering how to use the plate forms at Clay Life to make that same shape and then use a pencil and compass to trace those concentric circles on the bisque and use wax resist with a very fine brush before dipping the plate into a bucket of glaze. And I still don't want even a slight foot on such a plate, but want them to stack compactly in a cupboard? Yeah I'm thinking of a more graceful profile in my plates.

 

The matte Indigo glaze is so very lovely, but the only matte glazes we have at Clay Life are white and black. I suppose I could use the Nights in Black Satin on a porcelain clay body and the Satin White on a black clay body like Laguna W3.

I likewise love the Alabama Chanin plates, inspired by hand stitch work. My plan is to use my tracing wheel sewing tool for putting stitch lines on my leather clay plates. However, I think I'll use another sashiko stitch pattern rather than the flower of the Camellia Etched dishware. I'll need to return to the public library and check out sashiko books for a different pattern. I'm more in love with the seed stitch salad plates. I imagine I'd pencil randomly the seed stiches and then go in later with a fine brush and wax resist. I imagine too all the labor to re-create with my own hands. There's a reason why the Camellia Etched dinner plate is $182 and why the Seed Stitch salad plate is $127 at Heath--they're so labor intensive and such an intentional design.

  

With mugs, I always fear I would drop this kind of mug with hole-less handle, but surprisingly, Heath's handle is a comfortable grip. But since handles are not my forte, I don't think I'll attempt this handle though I have in the past created handles that are a completely round cylinder. Maybe my re-design be a "hole-less" round handle with an indentation for fingers for a petite coffee cup and saucer.

 

Lastly I took a pic of the mug with the low handle. It's funky, and I like it. I just don't know if I could make a comfortable-to-hold handle like the one below.

 

I perused plates of second and third quality at the back of the showroom. My dessert plate was only $8.50 minus a discount though I did pay $31 for the so very cute and wee plaza bowl, but with our class tour discount, I didn't mind.

Right away I used both plate and bowl that night and the next.

My new bluejay bowl and aqua plate are in frequent use in my dessert ritual of either citrus panettone or fruit and French whole milk yogurt this winter.

clay: field trip to a ceramics factory

I got to accompany the Advanced Ceramics and IB art classes to Heath Ceramics in Sausalito. The weather was glorious in the San Francisco Bay Area, and we got to cross one of my favorite tourist destinations, the Golden Gate Bridge.

Love this bridge.

First stop was the community meeting room. I was delighted by all the fun little sculptures. If I take Zan's clay class on Tuesday and Thursday evenings at CSM in the spring semester, then I'll definitely sculpt some penguins. I do like ocean-themed animals on those kinds of clay assignments.

I adore clay still lifes.

I later learned from Joe Farnham, our tour guide and the dinnerware production engineer that Heath employees recently had a pumpkin-making contest, hence the orange Mickey Mouse head. And what looks like Halloween-themed clay makings below.

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While one group of students walked through the factory, we sat down our turn and took notes and listened to Natalya Orczykowska, the studio chemist who specialized in ceramics and refractory materials in her university studies in Poland. She explained and talked about the acid tests, both from food and cleaning materials, on Heath glazes. Heath releases seasonal glazes twice a year for both dinnerware and tile.

And then the factory tour for my group of students. Already I was fascinated by the noise and hubs of activity.

Joe started at the beginning: the blunger room, where IMCO dry clay is mixed with water to form a slurry or a slip in the clay making drum. As in the small studio, the clay is stored in plastic, all 600 pounds of it.

At Heath, they've gone to zero waste and recycle even clay scraps to be added to the drum and then the pug mill before forming. Even excess water is cycled back into the clay drum for another use.

Joe explained that the clay is a proprietary mix, and there's only one clay. Here's the clay from the pug mill, ready for forming.

Next I took numerous pictures of the plaster molds, probably because I'd spent the summer casting vases and dishes, and a bit of the jiggering or jollying--where the plug or block of clay that had been extruded from the pug mill was then placed into a spinning mold.

I spied all the bags of plaster for the molds. Of course, I noticed because of all the plaster casting and the making of a plaster mold this past summer.  

Below is a picture of all the plaster molds, some of which are from the 1960s.

I watched a worker trim pottery...

and spied on another worker using a jolly. I could see he was making mugs. Our tour guide said that a pot is touched by at least 17 different hands in the making. And I wondered about the numbers in their recordkeeping notes. Much smaller production numbers than you would see at other dishware and tile factories in other parts of the globe like China or England. 

 

I was fascinated by this craftsperson attaching handles to mugs with no scratching or scoring, just slip and a firm push.

And here you can see all the shrinkage from green ware to finished pot.

I do love the low slung handle shape on the mug below.

Machinery. Glazing.                        

 

And the ginormous gas kiln. Like any other kiln, it's got its hot and cool spots. And even though Heath is a factory, production is small compared to dinnerware manufactured on other parts of the globe like China and England. However, my plate production is SLOWER and much TINIER in output than commercial pottery plants and even some professional potters. And that's how I'm going to justify charging $50 for one of my thoughtfully made, one-of-a-kind, no two-alike dinner plates. 

Onward. We headed toward the quality control space, where all the pottery was sorted and inspected for glaze defects. 

The restroom was adjacent to the glaze chemicals.

One of the students gave me one of the the chunk of clays Joe passed out to us. What’s interesting about this clay formula is that it vitrifies in combination with its glaze at Cone 03 in ONE firing. Whaaat!?! That’s huge savings or cost in energy. In the classroom and community studios where I clay, we do the usual firing process of firing bone dry raw clay to Cone 04, then glaze the bisque after it’s glazed to Cone 5/6 if in an electric kiln or Cone 10 in a gas kiln. Joe said if we put this clay into our electric kilns, it would be a melted mass.

We had just 15 minutes to browse the shop, where I made a beeline to the seconds shelves and found a "happy" green vase in which to put an orange flower and give to Michaela for Christmas.

Back to the community room, where the rest of the students were drawing still lifes.

And I needed to use the restroom before leaving Heath and took pictures of these frames of wall test tiles.

 

I love the earthier and calmer color palette of the tiles below.

No time to eat lunch at Heath or walk down to the pier to sketch nature. Time to climb on to the bus and head over to the vista point and sketch a bridge. High tide happened, and so we had to walk around the parking lot to get to the bus across the street. Joe said there's a flood wall to prevent ocean from entering Heath, but I imagine before the flood wall, its concrete floors had to be mopped of salt water.

 

Farewell Heath! Some day I may buy its dinnerware if my plates don't survive our own household's daily use.

The vista point where we wanted to be was on the Marin and not the San Francisco side, and so we were bussed from Sausalito to San Francisco and back to Sausalito, where we parked and ate lunch. I sketched a perspective of the bridge like the one on the right.

 

The majority of students did not sketch.

And we were okay with that. It was a gorgeous day to be sitting on the dock of the bay, watching the tide roll away...