Master of Fine Arts Thesis
SOLASTALGIA
Corwyn Lund
Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirement for the degree of Master of Fine Arts, School of Art and Design
Division of Ceramic Art
New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University Alfred, New York
2022
Corwyn Lund, MFA
Thesis Committee:
Matt Kelleher Adero Willard
Johnathan Hopp [Fall 2020 Advisor]
Walter McConnell [Spring 2021 Advisor]
Linda Sikora [Fall 2021& Spring 2022 Advisor]
Abstract
The ceramic sculpture and installation work in my thesis exhibition, titled
SOLASTALGIA, explores uncanny relationships between architecture, photography, climate change, and war. The exhibition is imbued with a sense of loss, entropy, and mortality provoked by solastalgia – an existential concern for the future of the Earth and humanity – that harkens back to the fears of nuclear conflict I felt
growing up in the 1980s during the Cold War. Grappling with contemporary global warming and historic tragedies like the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, ceramic proves an apt medium for my work and research engaging the molecular
chemistry and cosmological force of fire integral to the ceramic process. Wall and floor installations of glazed commercial tile, augmented by neon lighting, slipcast pottery, and clay printed sculptures evoke the extreme heat of the kiln as
analogues for climate catastrophes and nuclear events. The sculptural works at the core of the exhibition connects Philip Johnson’s Glass House (1949) to the 2020 California wildfires through the perseverance of brick structures after all else has burned to the ground. Building upon a series of historical connections between ceramics and photography, my past and recent ceramic works are related to photography through shared indexicality, imaging chemistry, temporality, and mechanical production.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to the Department of Ceramic Art and my fellow grad students for spending two transformative years together. Deep gratitude goes to the School of Art and Design’s excellent technical teaching staff – including Shawn Murrey, Hannah Thompsett, James Tingey, Tim McKee, and Eric Taylor – for being in the trenches with us makers. My thesis exhibition would not have been possible without the consultation and fabrication assistance of Daniel Vrana at the
University of Buffalo School of Architecture, Sam Reeder at Lite Brite Neon, and Jim Mighells in Alfred Engineering’s STEP Lab. I am indebted to the factory workers around the world who produced the commercial tiles I am privileged to use in my artistic practice. A round of applause goes to my exhibition production and installation team of Ethan Samaha, Adrian Berry, Hudson Bell, and Olin Gannon who met every possible challenge to help me across the finish line. For their guidance of my academic research and writing, many thanks are due to Wayne Higby, Meghen Jones, Linda Sikora, Jenni Sorkin, the Fred Gertz Center for Academic Success, and the Scholes Library who have made this document
possible.
All my love to ACNB for being the guardian of my Tender Heart through it all.
The earth is a kiln.
People walk out of it.
This happens seconds ago.
The skies tear and become as red as a flower.
– Lisa Robertson
Inside Out
My recent sculpture and installation works establish uncanny relationships between architecture, photography, and ceramics as a means of grappling with existential distress in the face of climate change and armed conflict. Using large, commercially made tiles to make wall works and floor installations, these
expansive surfaces record the transformations of chemistry and extreme heat within the kiln as analogues for climate and nuclear events. Glazes are formulated and applied to emulate microscopic views of biological matter, telescopic views of the cosmos, and cameraless photograms of the kiln interior itself. Such
photographic qualities reveal the alchemical links between ceramics and photography, while imbuing the works with a documentary quality that is less personal self-expression than the self-evident result of natural forces beyond human control.
The term ‘solastalgia’ – coined by Australian environmental researcher and philosopher Glenn A. Albrecht – refers to the distress caused by climate change.
Current global conflicts and the mounting climate crisis are provoking an anxiety about the future of the Earth and humanity that I have not felt since the 1980s when growing up under the threat of Cold War nuclear conflict. As a teenager whose political worldview was shaped by punk subculture, I came to stand in opposition to nuclear armament and other social and environmental ills, yet I understood little about the material realities that songs like Crass’ Nagasaki Nightmare (1980) referred to1. As a mid-career contemporary artist seeking to understand the origins of my solastalgia in nuclear anxiety, I began using ceramic research and practice as a mean to understand the incomprehensible atomic bombing of Hiroshima. By analyzing the scarred porcelain surface of the Bowl from Hiroshima, Japan, I came to grasp the atomic bomb as a monumental kiln turned inside out upon the city and its inhabitants, instantly producing a ground temperature three times that of a conventional ceramic kiln in an unbounded expanse of several miles [Figure 1]. Works in the exhibition digitally reproduce this artifact and call to mind the photogram-like images etched into the city’s surfaces by the bomb’s flash of radiant heat. Other works remind viewers of the resilience of architectural ceramic by referencing the phenomenon of brick structures left standing as inadvertent memorials to war and wildfire after all else has burned to the ground.
1 Tim and Joanna Smolko, “Punk Rock: Three Chords and the Apocalypse,” in Atomic Tunes : The Cold War in American and British Popular Music. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2021), 209-240.
The scale and placement of work in the SOLASTALGIA exhibition were calibrated to the existing gallery architecture and arranged in tableaus that choreographed viewers through a series of sculptural encounters. Upon entering Alfred’s Fosdick- Nelson Gallery, viewers faced the intense light of Gimme Shelter (after Henry Fox Talbot), a composition of ten black tiled window forms backlit with orange neon lighting emulating the fiery heat of the kiln from which these pieces were born.
Passing into the gallery’s main space brought viewers into a constellation of allied works – Red River, Brick for Ukraine, Modernist Culture Vultures, H-Bowls, and White Glove Service – which together portend an apocalyptic future marked by war, wildfires, nuclear disaster, and environmental contamination. As the spatial and conceptual anchor of the exhibition, this installation extended across over 160 square feet of floor space, rose from floor to ceiling at its center, and served as a display platform for slipcast sculptures modelled from 3D scans of bowls, bricks, and gloved hands. Encircling it on three walls were wall works which push the thematic and technical boundaries of the ‘tile pictures’ I have been making since 2016. Early works in that series were revelatory and have since proven vital to my understanding and development of ‘the photographic’ in my ceramic artwork.
Figure 1. Bowl from Hiroshima, Japan, 06 August 1945. Porcelain and glaze with earthen debris. Approx. 3” tall x 5” diameter.
On Architecture…and Ceramics
Architecture has always been central to my artistic practice, and I have carried its ideas, history, materials, and tools of production forward in my ceramic art. The commercial ceramic products I have used to produce my ‘tile pictures’ since 2016 remain fundamental to the more expansive ceramic tile installations that undergird the SOLASTALGIA thesis exhibition. Early ‘tile pictures were made by incising
perspective drawings into commercially made porcelain panels using a
contractor’s tile saw before applying layers of glaze. Departing from the use of representational line drawings to create illusionistic space, in my thesis work the viewer is immersed in the exhibition space amongst architecturally scaled
elements. I value this new direction for its impact upon the body of the viewer – rather than being confined to the visual – which provides a far more consequential, peripatetic experience. This is the first time my ceramic work has approached the spatial dynamism and scale of my formative public art installations like swingsite and Word Count, which bookend a decade of work engaging Toronto’s
architecture and urban fabric before shifting my focus to ceramics.
The constellation of sculptural works at the spatial and conceptual centre of the SOLASTALGIA exhibition were informed by an uncanny chapter in the history of Modern American architecture. In 1950, American architect Philip Johnson
infamously cited a burned down village he saw as a primary design inspiration for his 1949 Glass House in New Canaan, CT. In a 1950 article in Architectural Review Philip Johnson wrote under the caption “Johnson House: Glass Unit at Night” that
“the cylinder, made of the same brick as the platform from which it springs,
forming the main motif of the house, was not derived from Mies, but rather from a burnt wooden village I saw once where nothing was left but the foundations and chimneys of brick. Over the chimney I slipped a steel cage with a glass skin. The chimney forms the anchor.”2 [Figure 2] This village was likely encountered during
2 Johnson, Philip. “House at New Canaan, Connecticut.” Architectural Review, September 1950, 58.
a tour of Nazi-invaded Poland in September 1939 when Johnson was working as a reporter for the American neo-Fascist paper Social Justice.3 In 1978, architect and theorist Peter Eisenman suggested that the Glass House was Johnson’s memorial to war, born out of a subconscious struggle with his neo-Nazi past.4 Referring to this building’s materials, design, and furnishings, Red River, Modernist Culture Vultures, and Brick for Ukraine draw back the Glass House’s veil of elegance in favour of a visceral, corporeal, and affective expression of the horrors of war.
Though shifts in scale, colour, and aesthetic tone distance my sculptural work from Johnson’s Modernist and minimalist Glass House, my work shares its material and conceptual focus on ceramic tile and brick as a symbol of perseverance in the face of incendiary bombing and climate induced wildfires alike.
In my sculptural remixing of the design features and furniture of the Glass House, Brick for Ukraine assumes the identity and centrality of the brick hearth at the core of Johnson’s design [Figure 3]. This grossly enlarged brick stands askew as if it had fallen from the sky and become lodged in the gallery floor. It was clay printed in porcelain from a 3D scan of a flux encrusted brick recovered from a dismantled Alfred atmospheric kiln. Enlarged to more than three times its original size, Brick was reduction fired to imbue its surface with sooty patina that emphasized its craggy texture and the insistent digital weft of the clay printing process. While closer to the size and placement of a headstone, the sculpture is still recognizable as a brick bases on its proportions alone. This is a testament to the primacy of this architectural unit within the human psyche. The digitized Brick for Ukraine evokes the destruction I have witnessed through news media coverage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine throughout my Spring 2022 thesis semester. Beyond this specific reference, Brick is also a monument to the importance and perseverance of this humble building material in architecture and ceramic art alike.
3 Michael Sorkin, "Where Was Philip?," Spy, October 1988, 140.
4 Peter Eisenman, "Introduction," in Robert A.M. Stern and Peter D. Eisenman, eds., Philip Johnson. Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 25.
Figure 2. Philip Johnson, Glass House, 1949. Exterior at Night.
Hovering above and perched upon Brick for Ukraine is Modernist Culture Vultures, a sculptural mobile of six black leather and foam vultures cut from vintage
Barcelona Chair cushions, the same chair used by Johnson to furnish his Glass House. Precisely waterjet cut and hung from an armature of brass rod, rings, and woven wire, the five cushion-vultures turn as their hanging structure slowly revolves overhead, animated by ambient air circulation within the gallery. The raggedy edges of the cushions, a result of their delamination after cutting, take on an unkempt, macabre appearance and three-dimensionality that belies their initial cookie cutter facture. Designed by Lilly Reich and Mies van der Rohe in 1929, two tan Barcelona Chairs sit opposite a matching Barcelona Ottoman and Daybed in the open concept living room of Philip Johnson’s Glass House. Modernist Culture Vultures re-imagines this furniture as if it had risen from the ashes of the fire decimated structure at the dark heart of Johnson’s architectural design. As
sculpture, this furniture is transformed into symbols of death and rebirth. Vultures are scavengers that feed on animal carcasses (carrion), flying, roosting, and feeding together in a flock, termed a wake. Sightings of such a group flying over a particular spot indicate a recently deceased animal on the ground below.
Figure 3. Philip Johnson, Glass House, 1949. Interior with Mies’ Barcelona Chairs.
In the SOLASTALGIA installation, Brick is framed by Red River, a sprawling floor work composed of glazed ceramic panels arranged in a herringbone pattern like the terracotta floor tiles of the Glass House. Evoking the Phlegethon in Greek mythology – a River of Fire in the underworld – Red River is a thirty-foot long pathway of crimson glazed floor tiles with a zig-zag edge. Dotted with white glaze heat blisters, their surfaces evince the chemistry and heat of their transformation within the kiln. Originating from the gallery corner, the installation bifurcates the gallery space, forcing viewers to navigate around its length to access the space and artwork on opposing sides. In the middle of the gallery, these 2-foot by 4-foot tiles culminate in a pinwheel formation that frames the base of Brick for Ukraine.
Red River also serves as a display platform for three woodfired, slipcast porcelain sculptures. In the middle sits White Glove Service– two empty butler gloves balanced uncannily on their knuckles with thumbs almost touching. Flanking this diptych, several feet away on either side are H–Bowl Stack and Clasped H-Bowls, which are comprised of slip cast bowls digitally modelled from a video of the Bowl from Hiroshima, Japan – an artifact held in the collection of the Science Museum
in London, UK. This porcelain bowl, recovered from the ruins of Hiroshima and its atomic bombing in 1945, has been the subject of lengthy academic research analysing it in relation to the history, theory, and technology of photography.5
On Photography…and Ceramics
Photography has increasingly informed my ceramic art since I began working with clay in 2012. My first slip-cast clay sculptures were based on ‘microphone
bouquets’ depicted in press photographs taken at news conferences around the world. Withing my sculpture, these images initially served as visual source materials, but became less important as I allowed the ceramic process to take a stronger lead. In 2016 I started making profound connections between the ceramic and photographic processes, through my two-dimensional ‘tile pictures’ such as GrayScale III [Figure 4]. To make this work, I incised linear perspective drawings into a large black tile, flooded its surface with thinned white glaze, then tipped the ceramic panel into a near vertical position so the excess glaze to ran towards its bottom edge. Irrigated through the tile’s incisions, the glaze would be
systematically deposited across the tile’s surface in a mix of black and white tonal gradients and linear highlights creating an illusory depth. I saw the result as inexplicably ‘photographic’ and felt the process of its making to be magical, like submerging exposed photo-paper into a bath of developer in the darkroom or watching a latent Polaroid photo develop in my hand. However, when the glaze dried, these images would disappear into a chalky white monochrome, leaving little trace of the photo-like phantoms that had momentarily emerged. Thankfully, firing the glazed panel the kiln – another type of darkroom – revived and
permanently affixed these images, much like developing a roll of film in a hermetically sealed canister. Such ‘photographic’ experiences, as they emerged
5 Corwyn Lund, “Hiroshima Bowl: A Forensic Analysis of a Para-Photographic Artifact,”
(College Art Association Conference Presentation, February 17, 2022).
from the heightened awareness that the ceramic process, redoubled the sense of wonder, awe, and magic that continues to draw me ever deeper into ceramic practice.
Figure 4. GrayScale III, 2016. ceramic panel, glaze. 24” x 24”. Left, just after glaze application in spray booth. Right, after firing.
The revelations of my GrayScale Series provided numerous questions that have been guiding my studio practice and scholarly research at Alfred. I have learned to define why certain visual-material phenomena seem photographic, the
connections between the photography and ceramic processes, and how these connections resonate with my artistic, social, political, and environmental
concerns. In hindsight I recognise that works like GrayScale III are an illusionistic
trompe l’oeil of a black and white photograph that lack the structural photographic condition of indexicality that will be elucidated later in this thesis. However, the piece does convey a sense of temporality commensurate with its making process that is characteristic of a long-exposure photograph. Also aligned with
photography is this ‘tile picture’s’ mode of mechanical production which stands in contrast to hand rendered drawings and paintings which can only ever be iconic.
Though recent work has superseded GrayScale Series, it remains a fundamental steppingstone in the development of my work bridging ceramics and
photography.
Historical connections between ceramics and Modern photography extend back to Thomas Wedgwood (1771-1805), the son of British potter and industrialist Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795), who is credited with creating the first photograph in the 1790s. Thomas treated pieces of paper and white leather with light sensitive silver nitrate that were exposed to light, temporality affixing the silhouettes of objects like leaves to these surfaces. Writer and ceramicist Paul Mathieu writes that Wedgwood’s goal was to develop this technology to transfer ornamental designs onto pottery within the Wedgwood factories.6 Though this certainly did not come to pass, the publication of his discoveries in 1802 by chemist Humphry Davy (1778- 1829) may have helped fellow Englishman Henry Fox Talbot (1800-1877) to
stabilize an array of photographic images starting in the mid-1830s.7
Casting much further back in ceramics history, ‘the photographic’ can be traced to at least the 12th-Century in Chinese Jizhou ware teabowls that have actual leaves permanently burned into their concave interiors [Figure 5]. This object shares numerous attributes with photographic images, including their indexical tracing of a now absent subject, imaging chemistry, freezing of time, and mode of
6 Paul Mathieu, "Photos/Pots and Pots/Photos: Ceramics and Photography: Similarities and Differences," 2018. Ceramics, Art and Perception 110: 93.
7 “Thomas Wedgwood (Photographer),” Wikipedia (Wikimedia Foundation, May 5, 2022), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wedgwood_(photographer)
Figure 5. Teabowl with Leaf Decor, stoneware with brown glaze. Jizhou ware teabowl, 12th-13th Century. 1 7/8” tall x 5 ¾” diameter.
mechanical production. The leaf burned into this stoneware bowl, is an indexical trace of a now vaporised leaf. Frozen in time, the leaf has been immortalised in fossilised in high-resolution tonal detail. This can be attributed to its molecular chemistry as differing concentrations of glaze fluxing minerals held in the leaf’s stem, veins, and lamina have lightened the bowl’s brown glaze into differing shades and tones. From our contemporary vantage point, the leaf decor could be mistaken for an x-ray, one of dozens of scientific uses of photography providing imagery unavailable to the naked eye. Though artful collage, the leaf also
exemplifies an act of forthright mechanical reproduction rather than the hand rendered artistic stylisations of foliage one would associate with centuries old craft forms. And yet, codifying the photographic logic of Tea Bowl with Leaf Decor does nothing to diminish the sense of magic and wonder it engenders. The leaf is experienced simultaneously as image, object, and absence, which begins to explain its powerful emotional charge. This bowl instantiates many of the
photographic qualities which are shared by Modern lens-based image making and
camera-less photography alike. Finding ‘the photographic’ in ceramics that predate Modern photography is a testament to the primacy of such image making across the ages and human cultures.
Camera Glazura (Heat Blueprint) is the most evident example of the overlap between photography and ceramics in my SOLASTALGIA exhibition. The work’s photographic nature can be explained through its imaging chemistry, indexical tracing a now absent subject, the freezing of time, and its mode of mechanical production which it shares with conventionally defined photography and Tea Bowl with Leaf Decor. To make Camera Glazura, five large tiles were pressed against the walls and floor of an Alfred kiln, quickly heated, then sprayed with a heat sensitive glaze. This invariably revealed the invisible imprint of the kiln’s heating elements which became permanently affixed to each tile in final firing. Arranged on the gallery wall as if the kiln was unfolded like a cardboard box, Camera Glazura represents a set of 1:1 blueprints, ready for reassembly into a life-size model of the kiln’s boxy interior. Revealing a general dissatisfaction with representational art forms, including conventional photography, this piece blurs the line between object and image, subject and representation, map and territory. In my ceramics practice, such iconoclasm is expressed through a robust engagement with materiality and sculptural processes, even in the making of principally two- dimensional work like like GrayScale III or Camera Glazura.
Just as both cameraless and lens-based photography rely on chemical processes for recording light, Camera Glazura relies on glaze chemistry to record heat.
Following an arduous path of invention reminiscent of photography’s early pioneers, I developed a heat-sensitive glaze to realise this piece. Applied by spraying, this glaze loads onto my selectively heated tiles in different
concentrations relative to the temperature where it lands. As its colourant is volatile, it sublimates into a gaseous form at higher temperatures. The water solubility of this colourant allows it to travel within the wet glaze matrix and such settle in various concentrations of matte blue glaze over a protracted drying time.
Figure 6. Glaze recipe and spray application tests for Camera Glazura (Heat BluePrints) in Alfred spraybooth. Bright blue indicates pattern of electric kiln elements. Spring 2022.
Contrary to my initial expectations, when spraying this glaze onto my heated tiles, the hottest areas were the most resistant to the deposition of glaze. As a result, the less coloured areas of Camera Glazura indicate the presence of heat, just as the brighter areas in a photograph indicate light had once been there [Figure 6]. Just as in my GrayScale pieces, when Camera Glazura’s glaze dried, the striking patterns that had first appeared on their surfaces would fade to a faint trace.
Resurrected upon final firing, these latent heat images became permanently affixed. Harkening back to early photography, the Camera Glazura tiles resemble a suite of photograms. Similarly archaic in their making, the kiln plays the role of an early camera obscura – Latin for “dark chamber”– by serving as a lighttight space within which ceramic/photographic imaging magically transpires.
Fundamental to the photographic qualities of Camera Glazura is its indexicality, the condition of being a physical trace of something no longer present [Figure 7].
Based in materiality rather than representational function, indexicality is
fundamental to my understanding of the Bowl from Hiroshima, Japan as a para- photographic artifact whose heat receptive surface has recorded the intense heat of the atomic blast like a photogram records light.8 As art critic Rosalind Krauss points out, “[the photogram] forces, or makes explicit, what is the case of all
8 Lund, Hiroshima Bowl.
Figure 7. Instances of indexicality encountered within Alfred studio practice, 2020-22. Left to right: Hand Trailed Through Ceramic Tile Dust Being Rinsed off its Surface, Paintbrush Indexed by Tile Dust Deposit, Impression of Heat from Hotplate Affixed to Tile with Glaze.
photography. Every photograph is the result of a physical imprint transferred by light reflections onto a sensitive surface.”9 Further distinguishing this
photographic pre-condition as indexical rather that iconic, Krauss writes that:
[Photography is a] transfer off the real; it is a photochemically processed trace causally connected to that thing in the world to which it refers in a manner parallel to that of fingerprints or footprints or the rings of water that cold glasses leave on tables.
The photograph is thus generically distinct from painting or sculpture or drawing. On the family tree of images it is closer to palm prints, death masks, the Shroud of Turin, or the tracks of gulls on beaches. For technically and semiologically speaking, drawings and paintings are icons, while photographs are indexes.10
By linking material and light, Krauss opens the door to indexicality as a common ground between conventional photography and other materials, surfaces, and chemistries – such as clay and glaze – capable of permanently recording and
9 Rosalind Krauss, “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America,” October Vol 3 (1977): 75.
10 Rosalind Krauss, “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism,” October Vol 19 (1981): 26.
displaying evidence of past presences [Figure 6]. Like the palms, face, body of Jesus, and gulls that Krauss’ exemplary indexes alludes to, Camera Glazura (Heat Blueprint) is an index pointing to a once-present, but now-dissipated lifeforce.
More than an illustration, its ghostly images instantiate entropy, the tendency for any system, living or mechanical, to lose energy and ultimately break down. This produces a powerful sense of mortality that pervades Camera Glazura that can be attributed to Paul Mathieu’s assertion that “both [ceramics and photography] are in a specific relation to death,” which he links to their respective roles as funerary offerings and visual records of the deceased. 11 Were the boxy proportions of Camera Glazura closer to that of a coffin, would this work suggest the inside of a cremation oven, rather than a kiln?
Camera Glazura (Heat Blueprint) is also photographic in having frozen time and movement. Each of its five panels is a visual record of a seven-minute exposure time to the heating elements embedded in the kiln’s interior surfaces. Similarly long-exposure times are employed in Modern photography to produce images that blur moving water, lending it an evanescent quality much like that of the heat patterns in Camera Glazura. Many excellent examples of this can be found in the photography of Toshio Shibata which capture water running over rural Japanese civil infrastructure [Figure 8]. Recognizing the formal similarities between his sublime work and my ‘tile pictures’ like GrayScale III has been deeply affirming [Figure 4]. Shibata’s photos exemplify film theorist Andre Bazin’s assertion that with the advent of photography “for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified as it were.”12 I see this as a visual condition that Shibata’s photos, GrayScale III, and Camera Glazura all share.
Extending Bazin’s seminal thinking, artist-researcher Susan Schuppli postulates that among the arts, only photography and film “could convincingly preserve the real time of an event through their contractual purchase with stillness, the frozen
11 Mathieu, Pots/Photos, 99.
12 André Bazin and Hugh Gray, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1960): 8.
instant, which enables perceptual replay and imaginary return.”13 I recognise this condition of change mummified in the pyroplastic slumping of fired clay tiles and frozen liquidity of glaze materials in many of my works. Camera Glazura is
inherently more subtle as it captures the state change of its glaze colorant from solid to gas, resulting in a diffuse image/index.
Figure 8. Toshio Shibata, Concrete Abstraction #3, Nikko City, Tochigi Prefecture, 2013.
Lambda print. 40” × 50”
By adopting a mechanical mode of imaging making in which the kiln is both imaging device and subject matter, Camera Glazura is further aligned with the aesthetic properties and truth claims most evident in scientific photography. Just as MRIs provide evidential views inside the human body that are otherwise unavailable to the naked eye [Figure 9], Camera Glazura makes invisible heat
13 Susan Schuppli, Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence (The MIT Press, 2020). 66.
energy visible to us as an index. The piece visually declares, ‘heat was here, now it’s gone, this is the evidence.’ The result is both deadpan obvious and a revelatory axiom of ceramic and photographic practice. Value judgements aside, the work is a proof of concept and a manifesto for future work. Throughout the SOLASTALGIA exhibition I decidedly remove my artistic hand from the work by using digital fabrication, deferring to chemistry as mark-maker, and by empowering the kiln to act as pyroplastic form generator. These are all modes of mechanical imaging and sculpture making which mitigate artful self-expression in favor of a higher truth than my own will. Camera Glazura is exemplary of this as it stands beyond reproach from any association with iconic drawing and painting.
Figure 9. MRI showing ACL Reconstruction of Author’s Left Knee, July 2003.
The sense of wonder and ‘dark magic’ that permeates the quest to develop early photographic techniques parallels my own engagement with the ceramic process as discovery and experimentation with powerful, fundamental, and invisible forces of natural law. As photographic techniques emerged in early nineteenth century England and Europe, terms like “magic pictures” were used to describe
photography, which resonated with the irrational, supernatural, and alchemical
understandings of science and nature that held sway at the time. After Henry Fox Talbot established that latent images could be printed on photosensitive paper in 1840, his friend and fellow photographic pioneer Sir John Hershel joked that he must be in partnership with the devil to have achieved this alchemical feat.14
On Photography…and Architecture and Ceramics
Synergising my research on Henry Fox Talbot’s photographic work with my interests in architectural and ceramics is the installation Gimme Shelter (after Henry Fox Talbot). Conceived as a doomsday scenario, the work places the viewer within a bunker-like space whose windows have been bricked over as a defense against a bright orange light suggestive of a climate or a nuclear event beyond this facile barrier. This work calls out the farce that one might hide behind physical or economic firewalls in the face of the global climate crisis, whose devastating forces are increasing in intensity and frequency with each passing year. An oblique ode to the history of photography, Gimme Shelter is composed of ten wall-
mounted ceramic panels of overlapping, slumped, and fused black tiles that were cut to the shape of the ten windows that are the subject of the first known
photographic negative, Latticed Windows (with the Camera Obscura). Made in August 1835 by Henry Fox Talbot, the image suffers from an understandably poor resolution and contrast, lending it an ominous quality [Figure 10]. This menacing tone is translated into ceramic panels with barbed profiles, defensively lapped patterning, and a sense of being organic matter imbued by their bubbled and aerated surfaces. In this they are reminiscent of the black and white macro photos of Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932), whose studies of botanical form and patterns took on strangely sculptural and architectural properties through his act of
magnification [Figure 11].
14 William Henry Fox Talbot and Michael Hoffman, Specimens and Marvels: William Henry Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography (New York: Aperture Foundation, 2000). 10.
Figure 10. Henry Fox Talbot. Latticed Windows (with the Camera Obscura), August 1835.
Paper negative mounted to Talbot’s notations. Printed here to original size of 1.4”x 1.1”.
Figure 11. Karl Blossfeldt.Trollius Ledebourii (Globeflower) | Phalaris Canariensis (Canary Grass), subjects enlarged many times using macro photography, Late 1920 to early 1930s.
Figure 12. Hypothetical positive print showing view out from latticed windows of Lacock Abbey, England. From digitally augmented version of Henry Fox Talbot’s, titled Latticed Windows (with the Camera Obscura), 1835. Inset, lower right; printed here to original size of 1.4”x 1.1”.
Blurring the distinctions between architecture, photography, cinema, and
ceramics, Gimme Shelter disorients viewers through a multiplicity of perceptual inversions that flip figure/ground, dark/light, solid/void, transparent/opaque, and interior/exterior. Henry Fox Talbot’s innovative negative was made by projecting an interior view out through the Oriel Window of Lacock Abbey onto a postage- stamp sized piece of paper soaked in silver chloride, which was mounted within a small wooden camera obscura. Fox Talbot’s invention of the negative-positive process within his prototypic film camera greatly contributed to the development of cinema sixty years later as a means of similarly recording reality on negative film for subsequent projecting back out as life-size positive using concentrated illumination. Using a combination of sculptural materiality and ethereal light, Gimme Shelter reconstitutes Fox Talbot’s miniaturized Latticed Windows as a life- size architectural ceramic and light installation. Its solid ceramic window forms recall the phenomenon of “blind windows” that have been bricked-in but remain hauntingly visible on the exterior of renovated buildings. Similarly producing a contradictory presence through absence, the orange neon light that constitutes the negative space surrounding these window forms may be experienced as solid walls in the afterimage burned onto viewers’ retinas. Asserting itself when viewers turn away from staring at it even momentarily, the result is a re-inversion of light and dark that returns the positive image to the reality that Henry Fox Talbot would have seen looking when out through his latticed windows [Figure 12].
The 1969 Rolling Stones’ song, upon which this installation is named, is prescient of today’s real and present climate dangers, though its lyrics may have only been meant metaphorically in reference to the social and political upheavals of the 60s:
[verse 1: Mick Jagger]
Ooh, a storm is threatening My very life today
If I don't get some shelter Ooh yeah I'm gonna fade away
[verse 2: Mick Jagger and Merry Clayton]
Ooh, see the fire is sweepin' Our streets today
Burns like a red coal carpet Mad bull lost its way
[verse 3: Mick Jagger and Merry Clayton]
Mmm, a flood is threatening My very life today
Gimme, gimme shelter Or I'm gonna fade away 15
The orange neon light of Gimme Shelter (after Henry Fox Talbot) generates virtual heat. Its color was chosen to mimic the heat/light of the kiln’s interior above
2000°F, the temperature necessary to produce these ceramic panels. This ominous light suggests an apocalyptic scenario beyond the blocked-in windows forms barely retaining it, whether from a nuclear event or a wildfire like those that turned the skies orange in California in 2020 [Figure 13].
Figure 13. Wildfire turns sky orange over Oracle Park Stadium, San Francisco, 09/09/2020.
15 Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. "Gimme Shelter." Genius, Accessed April 27, 2022.
genius.com/The-rolling-stones-gimme-shelter-lyrics
Outside In
My thesis exhibition represents my renewed commitment to the robust materiality of ceramics as a means of engaging the most pressing social, political, and
environment issues of our time. The apocalyptic visions offered by my
SOLASTALGIA exhibition materialise my worst fears about the end of the Earth and humanity, as precipitated by armed conflict and climate catastrophe. The dark aesthetic and messaging of these works harkens back to the visual culture, lyrical content, and angst-ridden musical delivery of 1980’s punk. Listening to bands like The Dead Kennedys as a suburban white male teen made my tender heart
palpitate, while shaping my political worldview in relation to the danger nuclear weapons posed. Returned in an instant to the same sense of political and
ecological doom, on 04 March 2022 I watched news coverage of the Russia invasion of Ukraine highlighting the threat to its nuclear power plants.
Broadcasting over a loudspeaker to Russian troops outside, Ukrainian personnel pleaded with invading forces to “Stop firing at the nuclear facility. Immediately stop firing. You are endangering the safety of the entire world.”16 This incident and its recollection nearly bring me to tears every time.
Employing an interventionist approach characteristic of my formative public art installations, the most consequential works in SOLASTALGIA puncture the envelope of the white cube gallery to allow the outside world to enter. Tiled-over windows make better walls in Gimme Shelter, while the real gallery wall becomes a window channelling the bright orange light of a nuclear or environmental event in from the outside. Red River seeps in through the corner of the gallery, whether lava flow or red tide, it is a maleficent intruder that can no longer be held at bay. Modernist Culture Vultures opens the gallery up to the sky, while Brick for Ukraine punctures
16 Malachy Brown, et al, “What Happened on Day 10 of Russia's Invasion of Ukraine,” The New York Times (The New York Times, March 30, 2022),
www.nytimes.com/live/2022/03/05/world/russia-ukraine?smid=url-share#stop-firing-a-look- inside-the-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-plant-as-russian-forces-attacked.
the floor plane beneath viewers’ feet, revealing displaced earth beneath the gallery building. However, unlike past site-specific interventions in which the goal was to move artwork out into the world, the SOLASTALGIA exhibition brings measured doses of the outside world into the gallery to remind viewers of the consequential relations between culture and nature.
Informed by recent and historical events, the spectre of the architectural ruin is omnipresent in my thesis work, as a reminder of our fragile existence on this planet. Sculpture and installation works reference Philip Johnson’s Glass House which he based on a burned down village in eastern Europe. Henry Fox Talbot’s dark, crooked, dematerialising image of Latticed Windows could very well be a photographic dispatch from the same battlefront. Translated into sculptural ceramic works, both buildings become architectural shards contrasting the qualities of fragility and durability that ceramics and architecture embody. In my thesis exhibition, even the conventionally wall mounted ‘tile picture’ A Watery Grave, is catastrophically split in two and visibly mended according to the Japanese art of Kintsugi as a sorrowful refrain for a broken world we have no choice but to live within. To continue doing, we must act.
Bibliography
Albrecht, Glenn. “‘Solastalgia’. A New Concept in Health and Identity.” PAN (Melbourne, Australia), no. 3 (2005): 41–55.
Barnes, Martin. Cameraless Photography. London: Thames & Hudson, 2018.
Batchen, G. (2016). Emanations: The Art of the Cameraless Photograph. Munich.
Bazin, André, and Hugh Gray. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (1960): 4–9.
“Karl Blossfeldt.” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, May 5, 2022.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Blossfeldt).
Brown, Malachy, et al. “What Happened on Day 10 of Russia's Invasion of Ukraine.” The New York Times. The New York Times, March 30, 2022.
www.nytimes.com/live/2022/03/05/world/russia-ukraine?smid=url-share#stop- firing-a-look-inside-the-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-plant-as-russian-forces-attacked.
Comaroff, Joshua, and Ker-Shing Ong. 2013. Horror in Architecture. [Novato, California]: ORO editions.
Eisenman, Peter, and Robert A.M. Stern, eds. Philip Johnson. Writings. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1979.
Jagger, Mick and Keith Richards. "Gimme Shelter." Track 1 on Let it Bleed. Decca, 1969, LP.
Johnson, Philip. “House at New Canaan, Connecticut.” Architectural Review 108, number 645 (September 1950): 152-59.
Krauss, Rosalind. “Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America.” October, Vol 3 (1977): 68–81.
Krauss, Rosalind. “The Photographic Conditions of Surrealism.” October, Vol 19 (1981): 3–34.
Lamster, Mark. The Man in the Glass House : Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2018.
Bibliography cont’d
Lund, Corwyn. “Hiroshima Bowl: A Forensic Analysis of a Para-Photographic Artifact.” College Art Association Conference Presentation, February 18, 2022.
caa.confex.com/caa/2022/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/13121
Mathieu, Paul. 2018. "Photos/Pots and Pots/Photos: Ceramics and Photography:
Similarities and Differences." Ceramics, Art and Perception (110): 92-98.
Schuppli, Susan. Material Witness: Media, Forensics, Evidence. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press, 2020.
Smolko, Tim, and Joanna Smolko. Atomic Tunes : The Cold War in American and British Popular Music. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2021.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Picador, 1977.
Sorkin, Michael. "Where Was Philip?" Spy (Oct. 1988): re-printed in Philip Johnson:
A Visual Biography. London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2020, pp. 108-109.
Talbot, William Henry Fox, and Michael Hoffman. Specimens and Marvels : William Henry Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography. New York, NY: Aperture
Foundation, 2000.
“Thomas Wedgwood (Photographer).” Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, May 5, 2022. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Wedgwood_(photographer).
Varnelis, Kazys. “‘We Cannot Not Know History’: Philip Johnson’s Politics and Cynical Survival.” Journal of Architectural Education (volume 49, no. 2), 1995: 92–
104.
Wall, Jeff. Dan Graham's Kammerspiel. English ed. Toronto: Art Metropole, 1991.
Image Sources
Figure 1: Science Museum Group, London, UK.
collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co5187/bowl-from- hiroshima-japan-bowl [Accessed 25 November 2020]
Figure 2: designflyover Consulting LLP.
www.e-a designflyover.com/project/vitrum-at-acetech/
[Accessed 31 December 2021]
Figure 3: e-architect, Online. [Accessed 31 December 2021]
www.e-architect.com/america/glass-house-ceiling-replacement Figure 4: ⒸAuthor.
Figure 5: Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis, US.
https://collections.artsmia.org/art/5803/teabowl-with-leaf-decor-china [Accessed 31 October 2021]
Figure 6: ⒸAuthor.
Figure 7: ⒸAuthor.
Figure 8: Laurence Miller Gallery. New York, US.
www.laurencemillergallery.com/artists/toshio-shibata [Accessed 31 October 2021]
Figure 9: Dr. Paul Marks, Toronto, Canada.
Figure 10: The Talbot Catalogue Raisonné, Online
talbot.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/search/catalog/artifact-4085 [Accessed 07 May 2022]
Figure 11: Wikipedia, Online.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Latticed_window_at_lacock_abbey_1835.jpg [Accessed 31 October 2021]
Figure 12: Blossfeldt, K. (2017). Karl Blossfeldt: Masterworks. DAP.
Blossfeldt, K. (2004). Karl Blossfeldt: 1865-1932. Taschen.
Figure 13: Scott Strazzante, San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images.
www.wired.com/story/those-orange-western-skies-and-the- science-of-light/ [Accessed 07 May 2022]
On Commercial Tile
Using architectural tile in my ceramic art is a logical extension of a broader artistic practice engaging in a critical dialogue with the built environment. Commercial tile’s precision, thinness, and predictability lend it a Modernist design aesthetic that I may accentuate or corrupt with further production processes like incising, slumping, and glazing. Not intended for such use, working with commercial tile is an intervention into, and diversion of, an existing stream of production and
consumption that has required tenacity to wade through. Finding these ceramic products has required significant market research, professional posturing to acquire, and extensive testing to understand and troubleshoot their use.
Making ceramic art with commercial tile from around the world has provided an eye-opening window into the global flow of goods. Though of varying quality and properties, price per square foot comparisons of several tile products I have worked extensively with indicate much about relative transport and labour costs:
-Made in Spain, picked up in Netherlands from regional distributor = $4 sq ft USD -Made in Spain, picked up in Montreal from Canadian distributor = $16 sq ft USD -Made in America, delivered for pickup at eastern US tile supplier = $7 sq ft USD -Made in China, purchased at “to-the-trade” tile seller in Toronto = $3.50 sqft USD -Made in India, delivered for pickup to nationwide “big-box-store”= $3.50 sqft USD
My work using commercial tile is indebted to the factories I have never visited and labourers I have not met who produced these goods, without which this thesis exhibition would not have been possible.
Essential Processes
- Integrating digital design and fabrication of objects and spaces - Spraying glaze in walk-in spray booth
- Cutting and incising commercial tile with contractor’s tile saw
- Building in the kiln; architectures of brick and refractory bars supporting shelves
Essential Software and Tools
- AutoCad, Rhino3D, Photoshop, Illustrator
- Plotter Printer to output digitally generated patterns - Rubi DC 250-1200 48" Tile Saw
- Husky Gravity Feed HVLP Spray Gun
Gimme Shelter (after Henry Fox Talbot), 2021-22
commercial tile, neon lighting, transformers, aluminum hanging cleats 10 elements; 87” x 100.5” x 3.5” installed
Production Process
To create Gimme Shelter’s relief patterned surfaced ceramic panels, 24” x 24”
black tiles were cut into ten smaller ‘diamond’ shapes using a contractor’s tile saw and arrayed in overlapping, shingle-like patterns atop two abutting 24” x 24” white tiles with the assistance of laser cut cardstock templates. Fired to △10, these small black tiles slumped and fused to each other and to the white tiles beneath, which serves as a ‘mending plate’ lending structure to the resulting bi-coloured ceramic panels. These resulting 2-foot by 4-foot ceramic panels were then waterjet cut to final shape, at a 45° angle, producing a sharp profile only possible with a multi- axis waterjet cutting machine.
Gimme Shelter’s ten ceramic panels were wall mounted using aluminium cleats atop neon backlighting designed to approximate the intense yellow-orange glow of the interior of a kiln at around 2000°F.
Materials
- Unglazed, thru-coloured black and white commercial tiles, 24” x 24” x 1/4”
- Brand/Product: Anatolia Prima Charcoal Matte and Warm White Matte - Made in China, purchased at “To-the-Trade” tile seller in Toronto
- 10mm clear glass tubing, phosphor coated to glow green. Tubes pumped with red neon gas to achieve an orange glow
- 5 Ventex Neon transformers #VT12030D-120 - 1 Tech-22 Gen3-8K30 transformer
- Monarch Metals MFPROJ-375 mated with MFEXT-1250, adhered with PC-11
Fabrication Equipment
- Rubi DC 250-1200 48" Tile Saw (artist’s own) - Lasercutter (in Alfred’s McMahon Building)
- Waterjet Cutter with Multi-Axis Head (in University of Buffalo SMART Lab)
Generous Production Assistance
Sam Reeder (AU BFA ’20), Chase Folsom, Ethan Samaha (AU BFA ’21), Jacob Willcox (AU BFA ’21), Daniel Vrana (UB Architecture), Adrian Berry (UT M.Music ’22), Olin Gannon (AU BFA ’23)
Guarded with Tender Heart, 2022 commercial tile, aluminum hanging cleats 34” x 24” x 2”
Production Process
Follows the same production process for the ceramic panels of Gimme Shelter while additionally exploring the use of the multi-axis water-jet machine to remove a piece in the centre of the black tiled panel. Doing so exposes a calligraphic white line of the ‘mending plate’ beneath. This is turbo-charged sgraffito.
Digital Design Tools, Fabrication Equipment, Production Assistance - See Gimme Shelter
Materials
- Unglazed, thru-coloured black and white commercial tiles, 24” x 24” x 1/4”
- Brand/Product: Anatolia Prima Charcoal Matte and Warm White Matte - Made in China, purchased at “To-the-Trade” tile seller in Toronto
- Monarch Metals’ aluminium MF625-36 cleats adhered to ceramic with PC-11
Modernist Culture Vultures, 2021-22
altered Barcelona Chair cushions, brass rod, rings, and wire
7.5’ x 11.5’ x 11.5’
Production Process
Water-jet cutting was used to precisely cut a collection of vintage Barcelona Chair cushions into silhouettes of vultures. The AutoTrace function in Adobe Illustrator was used to generate vector drawings from high-contrast photographs culled from the Internet. The powerful waterjet cutter was able to cut these pieces without abrasive, thereby eliminating the need to clean the cut pieces of sandy debris.
Materials
- Vintage Barcelona Chair cushions (Mies van der Rohe & Lilly Reich design) - Brass rod from Metal Supermarket, brass rings from nautical supplier, woven brass wire from grandfather clock supplier
Generous Production Assistance
Daniel Vrana (UB Architecture), Noah Greene (AU MFA ’22), Ethan Samaha (AU BFA ’21), Adrian Berry (UT M.Music ’22)
Brick for Ukraine, 2022
△10 reduction fired porcelain 25.4” x 15.5” x 14”
Production Process:
Brick for Ukraine was clay printed from a 3D scan of a flux encrusted brick
recovered from an Alfred atmospheric kiln deconstructed in September 2021. The digitized brick was truncated, reoriented, and enlarged to the maximum printable height of Alfred’s largest Lutum 5XL clay printer. Using the PrusaSlicer software, I tweaked the print settings to generate a chunkier-than-normal “digital weft” by employing a 3.5mm layer height with a 7mm nozzle. 5 solid “top” layers and 3 solid “bottom” layers, a double wall perimeter, and a 10% “Grid Pattern” infill provided the minimum internal support and external structure required to build this object, while reducing print time to only(!) about twenty-hours. The printer was reloaded around once an hour with 747 Porcelain that was machine pugged to give it a more plastic consistency.
3D clay printing this enclosed, boxy form as a single monolithic unit proved extremely challenging. After numerous failures, this was eventually resolved by truncating one end of the brick model and printing the object upside down from its installed orientation. Starting with the top of the object against the print bed and working “downwards,” the four vertical sides and infill were readily printed. Once the tilted plane defining the truncated base was reached, it built steadily as a series of gradually ascending steps that could be smoothed together to ensure structural integrity.
Throughout the two-day print marathon, the sculpture was kept wrapped in plastic, which has proven to be the best strategy for minimising the cracking of clay printed objects in the Blaauw dryer. Dried with a three-day cycle, then transferred into the kiln in the same upside-down orientation it was printed, the piece was reduction fired to △6 reduction. Firing shrank the brick about 18% to a final size about three times larger than the brick it was modelled after. It also deposited sooty carbon markings that move directional across its micro and macro textured surfaces.
Generous Production Assistance
Michael Gossack (MY3D Agency, Toronto), Julianna Dougherty (AU BFA ’22)
Materials
- 747 Porcelain clay body
Matte White with carbon soot when gas-fired in reduction to △6 in HellCat
Grolleg 57.5 %
Custer Feldspar 18.75 %
Silica 15.75 %
Pyrax 5.25 %
Molochite 200M 3.25 %
TOTAL 100 %
+ Bentonite 3.03 %
Digital Design and Fabrication Tools - Artec Eva 3D scanner
- Artec Studio software - Rhino 3D to edit 3D model - PrusaSlicer software - Lutum 5XL clay printer - Blaauw clay dryer
Red River, 2022
commercial tile, △10 reduction fired copper red glazes 20 pieces, each 23” x 47” x 3/4”; 31’ x 8.4’ x 1.5” installed
Production Process
A sequence of glaze application procedures and glaze recipes were developed to capture the wide range of organic mark making possible when Pete’s Copper Red glaze in thicky layered and reduction fired to △10. I found this glaze unique in the ways it retains evidence of multiple glaze applications, even after melting into a cohesive glazed surface. The resulting appearance is somewhat like watercolour paint staining paper as colour density builds with successive layers and darker outlines surround dried glaze pours and platelets. The glaze also develops a graininess similar to analogue photographs or old-school photocopies. Together these glaze effects provide a phenomenal visual depth that belie its glossy
flatness. Uncut 24”x 48” commercial tiles were warmed in a kiln to approximately 225°F degrees, with a ramp of 450°F/hr, which promotes glaze adhesion to this already vitrified ceramic. Warmed tiles were sprayed with a thick base layer of
‘gummed’ Pete’s Copper Red glaze. Once fully dried at room temperature, which would take a full day, layers of water-laden Parched Earth Copper Red Variant
glaze were poured on top of the dried base-glaze. Loaded into a gas kiln, these secondary layers of glaze were force dried by rapidly, and repeatedly, heating to 400°F and opening the kiln door to allow the steam to escape and the tile to cool.
Three or four rounds of this process precipitate the fractalized crazing of the wet glaze layer. Lastly, Crawling Copper Red Variant and Grey Matter/More Brains glaze were selectively poured and occasionally sprayed atop the previous dried glaze layers. With a final reduction firing to △10, the bas relief of glaze layers would melt down into a cohesive glazed surface. After firing, the glazed tiles were trimmed on all sides to the same dimension, known as ‘rectifying’ in tile trade.
Glaze Recipes
- Pete’s Copper Red △10 Reduction (gummed) A Gloss Transparent Red glaze
Custer Feldspar 73 %
Whiting 12 %
Gerstley Borate 10 %
Silica 5 %
TOTAL 100%
+ Tin Oxide 1 % + Copper Carbonate 0.3 % + Veegum-T 0.5 %
+ CMC Gum 0.5 %
- Crawling Copper Red Variant I (+10% Mag Carb) △10 Reduction
The addition of 10 to 25% Magnesium Carbonate to the original Pete’s Copper Red recipe causes the glaze to crawl and turn powdery, matte, and opaque, while also tinting it various shades of pink. These are but two of several recipe variants I employed to make Red River:
Custer Feldspar 64.84 % Magnesium Carbonate 10 %
Whiting 10.67 %
Gerstley Borate 8.90 %
Silica 4.45 %
Tin Oxide 0.88 %
Copper Carbonate 0.26 % TOTAL 100 % + Darvan 811 0.03 %
- Crawling Copper Red Variant II (+25% Mag Carb) △10 Reduction
Custer Feldspar 61.23 % Magnesium Carbonate 15 %
Whiting 10.07 %
Gerstley Borate 8.40 %
Silica 4.21 %
Tin Oxide 0.84 %
Copper Carbonate 0.25 % TOTAL 100 % + Darvan 811 0.03 %
- Grey Matter/More Brains △10 Reduction
A Matte Metallic Pewter-Grey crawling glaze. Accidentally formulated by inverting the quantities of Copper Carb and Silica of Crawling Red Variant
Custer Feldspar 50.77 % Magnesium Carbonate 22.67 % Whiting 8.34 % Gerstley Borate 6.95 %
Silica 5.98 %
Tin Oxide 3.49 %
Copper Carbonate 1.80 %
TOTAL 100 %
+ Darvan 811 0.03 %
- Parched Earth Copper Red Variants △10 Reduction
Following the valuable suggestions of Shawn Murrey, who cited Graham Marks’ work as a precedent, I began adding 6 to 9% of Bentonite to the above recipe. This promoted the fractalized cracking of thick glaze layers when force dried. The bentonite causes the mixture to gel and thicken requiring the addition of significantly more water to arrive at a pourable consistency. The addition of Darvan 811 makes this thixotropic mixture move when agitated, encouraging pools of glaze to run when I tilted thickly glazed tiles. The rapid, forced evaporation of this excess water precipitates the desired glaze to craze like crazy!
Bentonite must be mixed into the dry ingredients before adding water.
Darvan 811 must be dissolved into water before adding to dry ingredients.
Materials
- Commercial tiles, pre-glazed white, 24” x 48” x 3/8” thick
- Brand/Product: MSI Ader Tegel Polished White floor and wall tile - Made in India, delivered for pickup at nearest NY state “Big-Box-Store”
Generous Production Assistance
Hudson Bell, (AU BFA ’23), Olin Gannon, (AU BFA ’23)
Clasped H-Bowls || H-Bowl Stack, 2021 woodfired slipcast porcelain
2 pieces, each 3.5” x 7.5” x 8” x 3.5” || 7.25” x 8.25” X 6.5”
Production Process
A one-second-long video of the Bowl from Hiroshima, Japan was screen captured and separated into still images. These stills were interpolated into a digital 3D model using Agisoft PhotoScan photogrammetry software, which was missing about 10% of the bowl’s exterior and 90% or its interior as they were missing vies from the photographic data set. Rhino3D software was used to ‘MeshRepair’ the digital object just enough to be 3D printable using default command settings that neither hid nor smoothed the resulting facetted planar repairs. The model was then rescaled to around 135%, split into four parts, and 3D printed using Alfred’s LulzBot TAZ Workhorse 3D printer. Wilfully doing so, visible artifacts of the translation from an entirely digital source into a real ceramic object carried
forward from the 3D printed ABS positive model to the slipcast porcelain positives.
Materials
- Woodfired Rainbow Casting Slip
A Warm-White base colour, with a full spectrum of subtlety-coloured
highlights suggesting the iridescence of a seashell’s interior when wood fired raw. Developed from valuable suggestions by Matt Kelleher.
Grolleg 40 %
OM4 Ball Clay 10 % Custer Feldspar 25 %
Silica 25 %
TOTAL 100 %
+ Sodium Silicate 0.25 %
Generous Production Assistance
Keith Simpson (2020-21 AU Instructor/Grinding Room Specialist)
Digital Design and Fabrication Tools
- Agisoft PhotoScan photogrammetry software
- Rhino 3D to edit, scale, and split into components for printing - Cura Lulzbot to slice 3D model and manipulate print settings - LulzBot TAZ Workhorse 3D printer for 2.85mm ABS filament
White Glove Service, 2021 woodfired slipcast porcelain 2 pieces, each 6.5” x 7” x 4.5”
Production Process
To make these slipcast porcelain sculptures, I made a plaster mold from a 3D printed, digital scan of my gloved hand clutching a piece of plywood held overhead. MY3D Agency in Toronto 3D scanned my hand, used the scanner’s proprietary software to generate a digital model, edited the plywood prop out of my hand, and provided me with a printable .obj file. Using Rhino3D I enlarged the model to about 135% and “Boolean Split” the object between the glove’s thumb and the rest of the hand. This allowed me to orient the linear striations typical of the 3D printing process with the texture evident in the fabric original. After piecing the printed pieces together, a complex multi-part mold was made from it,
reproductions were slipcast, bisqued, and woodfired to a final size around 20%
larger than life. The 3D print’s fabric-like texture and carried forward into the final pieces contributing to their trompe l’oeil effect.
Materials
- Reeves Casting Slip (from Cushing’s Handbook by Val M. Cushing)
Cream colour with subtlety-coloured highlights when wood fired raw
Kona F-4/Minspar 34 %
Grolleg 40 %
Silica 26 %
TOTAL 100 %
+ Darvan 7 0.32 %
Digital Design and Fabrication Tools
- Artec Eva 3D scanner & Artec Studio software (at MY3D Agency, Toronto) - Cura Lulzbot software to slice 3D model and manipulate print settings - LulzBot TAZ Workhorse 3D printer for 2.85mm ABS filament
Generous Production Assistance
Michael Gossack (MY3D Agency, Toronto)
A Watery Grave, 2022
commercial porcelain panel, △6 reduction fired glazes, cold-cast brass 47.5” x 47.75” X 2.25”
Production Process
A Watery Grave is a record of organic mark-making resulting from the layering of glazes of differing viscosities, painterly pouring of multiple glaze washes, and patient acceptance of peeling, gravitational pull, and evaporation time. Positioned in the kiln with an angle of approximately 8.3° to promote the layered glaze to move towards bottom of ceramic panel, the piece was reduction fired to △6, fully supported on its backside with kins shelves supported on silicone-carbide bars.
Accepting the unanticipated bloating of the tile body and clean fracturing of the tile, the piece far exceeded my expectations, overbearing will, and intent.
Materials
- Unglazed, thru-coloured white commercial tile, 48” x 48” x 8mm thick - Brand/Product: Stonepeak Ceramics Dolce_48 Pure White Honed Finish - Made in America, purchased in US from tile supplier
- Monarch Metals MFPROJ-375 mated with MFEXT-1250, adhered with PC-11
Glaze Recipes
- K.S. HU4 glaze (from *Cushing’s Handbook by Val Cushing)
Gloss Transparent Turquoise Blue when gas-fired in reduction to △6 Contrary to Cushing’s notes, this glaze never turned red in reduction.
Nepheline Syenite 28.6 %
Frit 3134 22.5 %
Frit 3110 4.1 %
Barium Carbonate 10.2 %
Zinc Oxide 4.1 %
Silica 30.6 %
TOTAL 100 %
+ Copper Carbonate 0.5 % + Tin Oxide 2.0 % + Veegum-T 0.5 %
+ CMC Gum 0.5 %
- Selsor Red glaze (from The Complete Guide to Mid-Range Glazes by J. Britt) Semi-Gloss Oxblood red when gas-fired in reduction to △6
Nepheline Syenite 56.3 % Gerstley Borate 12.5 %
Whiting 10.4 %
Silica 20.8 %
TOTAL 100 %
+ Copper Carbonate 0.8 % + Tin Oxide 1.5 %
Camera Glazura (Heat Blueprint), 2022
commercial tile, △6 cobalt glaze, aluminum hanging cleats 83.7” x 95.5” x 1.5”
Production Process
5mm thick commercial tiles were to cut to the same dimensions as the three walls, floor, and door of Alfred’s PG-13 electric kiln. One at a time, they were pressed against the interior surfaces of the kiln, rapidly heated with the maximum programmable speed ramp of 9999°F/hr. to approx. 200°F, and immediately sprayed with glaze formulated to load in differing quantities on heated vs. non- heated areas. The high contrast heat patterns that invariably emerge within the wet glaze will fade to a faint trace when the glaze dries. On final firing these
patterns will re-emerge with a visual contrast midway between that within the wet and dry glazed surfaces.
Glaze Recipe
- Heat Blueprint glaze (adapted from Katz-Burke Matte) Matte Slate-Blue when fired in an electric kiln to △6
EPK 29.23 % Ferro Frit 3124 22.56 % Nepheline Syenite 20.37 %
Whiting 17.10 %
Silica 10.74 %
TOTAL 100 %
+ Bentonite 12%
+ Redacted ingredient 9%
Materials
- Unglazed, thru-coloured white commercial tile, 24” x 48” x 5mm thick - Brand/Product: Grespania Coverlam Blanco Matte
- Made in Spain, purchased in Canada through North American distributor - Monarch Metals’ MFPROJ-375 mated with MFEXT-1250 cleats, adhered to ceramic panels with PC-11 paste epoxy
Generous Production Assistance
Shawn Murrey (Alfred University Senior Kiln Specialist)
