Images- Glacier
Images- Mate Cups and Pasties
Artist Statement
During the middle of the semester, we were assigned to work
with an international student to create a center piece for an elegant dinner
party coming up in February. I work with Victoria from Argentina, and she
shared all sorts of memories with me about her home country and two of those
memories gave me inspirations for the dinner party piece. One memoir was around
her birthday in late January when she and her family would go visit ski resorts
up in the mountains to go skiing and celebrate her birthday. Therefore I research
more into the Argentina Mountains and for me the color as well as the formation
appeared more glacier like. This is what gave me the idea to construct my own
glacier formation as a perfect centerpiece because I believe it would be beautiful,
elegant, and best represents Argentina. During this time, I was teaching myself
on using the pottery wheel and I learned I could create smooth textures with it,
ideal for making small dishes to represent some glacier puddles. After the
dishes were created, I used the coil method to assemble the shape of the mountain
I desired. Once the coils reached a favorable height, I took a large slab of
clay and draped it over the coils, then picked the edges to form it into the
top of shape of a mountain. To give it a
more of the rough, icy texture on the sides I used one of the tools and small
slabs of clay and press up against the side to carved into the ice like shapes.
Another memoir she spoke rather highly about was
the variety of food they have in Argentina, especially afternoon tea and pastries.
In fact she stated if she could bring one thing from Argentina to America it
would be their specialty drinks known as mate, a highly caffeinated tea. Mate
is served in a unique, smallish round vessel and uses a special straw;
traditionally they pass this drink around to other family member during tea
time or a celebration. What I thought was interesting was that mate cups comes in
many styles and shapes, so for this piece I created a variety of mate cup, each
with a different appearance as representation of different family members. I
used the pottery wheel once again to achieve the smooth texture look for the
cups and also used the wheel to create these small spiral circles that look
very similar to the Argentinean pastries and cookies. Next I thought it would
be an interesting idea to create an unique shape by stack the cups on top of
each other. Unfortunately with this particular piece I had disassemble the
stack to ensure nothing bad would happen to it when it was in the kiln, luckily
nothing was broken and the ‘cookies’ fitted right into those empty spaces to
help make the piece complete. I tend to go overboard when it comes to glazing ceramic pieces, I mix one too many colors and then to wash off some of the glaze off but it's only to bring out the texture more. Glazing I tend to say are unpredictable, especially
will mixing with other glazes, but both pieces came out dark then I expected.
Overall, I am rather pleased in what I have created but the Glacier one is my
favorite.
Research
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