Thursday, December 7, 2017

Dinner Party

 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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