Loose Threads

After spending a few months experimenting in the Ceramics workshop of the ANU School of Art & Design I have learnt a little bit about clay, glazes, stains, firing temperatures and techniques of pressing, pouring and hand building. I don’t have much of an interest in throwing, or at least not yet. But I love the plasticity of clay and in particular how you can work with different slips to produce layered palimpsests of colour, line and shape. I hope to develop these techniques and put them to use in my DECRA research as it progresses.

In the interim I have explored how my series of flannel shirt photograms might be reworked through this material and in the process I developed a new body of raw, unfinished work. Tentatively titled Liner Notes, they are still under development but I have written about my efforts to think and make material poetics in a recent issue of Axon: Creative Explorations. This volume is edited by Caren Florance, Jen Webb and Jordan Williams and my paper is called Loose Threads.

The images above and below show different approaches to rendering flannel fabric and patterning through a ceramic mode.

Images: UK Frederick, 2018