When I was working on my masters I was introduced to Southern Ice Porcelain which was unlike anything I had ever worked with before. I quickly fell in love with the ease of achieving translucency and the stark white of the fired clay. For the past four years now I have been working almost exclusively with the clay for my functional work. However last fall during my semester as artist in residence at the Red Deer College I began slowly to experiment with other clay bodies again. I began looking for a clay that I could use in contrast to the white porcelain. At first I thought of working with glazes and making some darker, matte black pieces, but that juxtaposition seemed to obvious and overdone. So I thought of my reasoning for loving the Southern Ice so much and it was because of the inherent properties of the clay, and thus I set out to find a clay body that I would appreciate for it’s material properties and then figure out the glazing later. I ended up working with Plainsmen H440 and 443 which is an iron rich clay that fires to a darker brown in reduction and interestingly somewhat mimics a traditional stoneware look in highfire oxidation (which I have yet to really explore and experiment with). I found that the speckling of the iron and and richness of the color were an interesting mix for the porcelain. I’m still at the beginning stages of this investigation with the claybody, partially as I have limited access to gas kilns right now, but so far I’m intrigued by the path it’s taking. I think there’s still lots left to be refined and exploited with this new material, but I thought I’d post a few pics in the meantime.

I’ve also started working on new but complimentary forms as well, I didn’t want to simply mirror the porcelain work in a new material, so the new forms have slight alterations or are a different form altogether. But hopefully, and I find, they still work well together in sets of porcelain and stoneware. I’ll post more pics in the next month or so as new work goes through the kiln, I’ve been working on large covered jars, platters and altered pieces with this clay ~ another perk in that it is far more responsive to certain forms than the porcelain which is far more likely to warp and crack when I push it too far!