On the weekend of March 14th-16th I headed down into Perthshire for the annual
Scottish Potters Association away weekend.
throughout the weekend there are specialist demonstrations, competitions, exhibitions and opportunities to meet and chat to fellow potters/ ceramicists.
The last time I was at Kindrogan was 7 years ago! As i had recently re-joined the SPA, i thought a little inspiration was in order!
The three main demonstrators were:
Lisa Hammond, A potter from London and the lady responsible for the amazing
Adopt A Potter scheme,
Simon Griffiths, an amazing animal sculptor from Northumbria and
Christine Hester Smith a ceramic sculptor, known for her illustrative work from Dumfries and Galloway.
I saw many new and old faces and was reminded of how warm and friendly everyone from the Scottish pottery and ceramics scene is.
I will admit that I spent most of my time with Christine and her Big Blue extruder! Christines work has focussed hugely on extruded forms which are manipulated and illustrated.
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| Christine and her Big Blue extruder - rigged up on a specially built platform |
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| Christine and her husband |
Christine had a HUGE amount of dies for the extruder and her making process was fascinating. She proceeded to throw and handbuild components - whichever way was easier to envisage her final pieces:
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| dies and bits for Big Blue |
Christine has a large expansion box attached to her electric pugmill at home for the wider platters and she brought several prototypes with her to work on.
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| penguin? |
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| extrusions, components |
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| heads, feet and bodies |
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| handles |
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| one of the pieces ready for decoration... |
Christine made a large amount of pieces and it was easy to see how prolific she could be in her own studio!
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| one of the first extrusions - boats! |
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| A candlestick for a gannet! |
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| the finished boat! |
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| components and platters |
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| Penguin candlestick! |
After a ceilidh and a few G&T's on Saturday evening, we were up nice and early for the Sunday demonstrations:
Again, I was spending most of my time with Christine and she was focussing on the slip decoration of her pieces. She admits that the most enjoyable part of the making process is the illustration of her pieces. Slip was used for this demo but Christine uses multiple applications at her studio and combines glazes, oxides and spray slip/ glaze decoration to give a depth of colour to her illustrations.
Everyone was really impressed with her very fine slip trailers and she was very generous in giving us a wee shottie!
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| the slip was naturally free flowing... |
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| ooh - a foxy |
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| whats this??? |
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| HAHAHHAHAHAH |
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| the slip trailers were much squeezed! |
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| only the start of the decoration |
Finally, Christine demonstrated the illustration of her large platters - it was great to see the free flowing lines of the drawing. The final decoration would be glaze inlay and it really was astonishing how much effort is put into one piece!
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| Happy Penguins..... |
Finally, Christine kindly agreed to finish a piece so it could be fired for our raffle next year, so she made a wee party penguin and slip decorated him for us!
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| Drying in the sun.... |
It really was a great weekend and thoroughly motivating!
Huge thanks to
Michelle Young-Hares for some ECA nostalgia and
Sylwia Kolasińska for being my buddy!
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