Pot shots

The Durham County Pottery Tour takes place every November, but we start planning in January. Photos were due last week. My work is kind of all over the place--I have my signature "zigzag" and "swoosh" pots, plus lots of functional ware, but also lots of work that doesn't really match anything else--yet is among my favorite stuff to make. It's challenging to pick Tour photos that capture the spread without looking like sprawl. Here's what I picked for this year:

1. Glazed, soda-fired zigzag teapot. Usually I leave these pots unglazed to show off the contrast between slip and clay body (in which case I'll typically weave a cane handle rather than adding a hand-built clay one). I like the wiggle of the spout on this pot, and that the diameter of the foot matches the diameter of the neck. There are also some nice glaze details, including melty reds and blacks amid the ochre.

2. Unglazed slip-on-bare-clay zigzag vases (both have liner glazes). I really enjoy making this type of pot, in part because they capture what I see as math and physics in my work. I cut (zigzag) or swipe (swoosh) patterns into slipped cylinders; these expand into organic designs as I stretch the pots from the inside. Friction torques vertical zigzags into spirals; parallel swooshes drift apart or scrunch together; and coarse canyons emerge between smooth-slipped plateaus. The transformations are different every time, functions of variables both within and beyond my control: initial patterns, depths of cuts, slopes of curves, plasticity of clay bodies, magnitude of expansion, and directional spin of the wheel.

Looking at this photo now, I'm realizing the graduated background is unevenly lit, which is embarrassing. Poor quality photographs don't flatter pots.

3. Candlesticks. Tons of fun to make, but not necessarily safe if you have cats. We keep these out of reach (theoretically) on our mantle, but our cats still manage to figure out how to knock them over. I can't sell the candlestick on the left because it's epoxied back together. Thanks, cats.

4. Chickarinas. Goofy, geeky, reasonably well-tempered tuned chicken whistles. These days I usually make four-hole chickarinas tuned to play two tetrachords (sol to do plus do to fa), which is just right for playing the melody of Schubert's Die Forelle. (Why do I play The Trout on chickens? Because I can.) I sell them with a fingering chart and a really good poem. They don't exactly coordinate with zigzag vases, but I fantasize that past customers will see the photo and remember to bring their chickarinas with them when they visit, now with a year of practice under their belts, so we can play chickarina duets.

Photographs of a spotted teapot

Thanks to penguin-photographing needs, I've finally found a practical location for the Flotone graduated background. The background is taped to the living room wall, tucked away into an otherwise unused corner. It drops onto a small table that S made years ago for plants, but that we use now to semi-hide Kapla blocks and Space Chips. I leave the bottom half of the background rolled up against the wall when not in use, and I unroll it and tape the edge to the table when taking photographs. The table sits next to a large south-facing window that looks out onto the porch, so the space gets natural light but is shielded from direct sun. This set up works reasonably well for daytime shots, but sunlight from a west-facing window sometimes casts undesirable shadows. If I'm feeling energetic, I tape a big piece of cardboard over that window; otherwise I work around the shadows. Nighttime sessions are better: I set up my snazzy 55W bulb in its diffuser and have more control over the lighting.

Below are some nighttime shots of a non-penguin. As my holes addiction wreaks havoc on my wrists (and would wreak havoc on a teapot), I'm experimenting with spots. I think I showed admirable restraint in this piece.

Zigzag evolution

Not sure why it took so long to go from this...

...to this...

...but I'm enjoying the evolution.

Chicken eyeball weather

I moved my wheel back outside a few weeks ago and reclaimed the foyer for regular foyer duty. With the move came a new idea for chicken use (to be revealed only if it works), so I've been preparing a new flock for that. This involves throwing egg shapes off the hump, forming the eggs into chickens, and adding beaks, eyeballs, and feathers. Because these are Orpington-inspired birds, I'm using a dark brown-black clay (Standard 266) and making the wee eyeballs out of porcelain. If the weather is too dry, the porcelain eyes dry out and crack as I form them between my fingertips, or they crack when I add the pupils with a needle tool. Very frustrating. But one morning last week, the weather was warm and so foggy-humid that the porcelain stayed beautifully hydrated. Prefect chicken eyeball weather.

This past weekend, a cold front moved in, and the weather is no longer perfect for chicken eyeballs--it's just plain perfect. Clear, crisp, cool in the morning and warm in the afternoon; lovely all around. This makes it easier to work outside with Standard 266. It's a relatively heavy clay, and tends to soak up lots of water. It's pretty gummy in humid weather, but quite nice to work with on drier days like today. This morning I decided to make a few teapots, and I set the pots-in-progress in the sunlight on the porch to speed up drying. Woe! After a mere 30 minutes, they were toasted almost beyond saving. Here's hoping all the parts stay attached to all the right places! Toasting wouldn't have happened during chicken eyeball weather; nonetheless, I'll take crisp and sunny over hot and humid any day.

A flock of chickarinas mingles with New Idea chicklets and assorted zigzag pots.

Toasted teapot: will all the parts stick together?

Pipes, pots, and espionage

Almost every weekday from 12:30-1:30pm, an organist is in Duke Chapel playing a demonstration recital on the Flentrop, Aeolian, or Brombaugh organ. A friend and I are privileged to share the Tuesday organ demo slot; each week, we trade off who plays and who turns pages/pulls stops.

This past Tuesday, my friend played was Bach's 5-part fugue, "Kyrie, Gott heiliger Geist," BWV 671. That was the first piece I ever played on the Flentrop some six or so years ago; my organ teacher had decided I needed to feel the weight of the piece on a large tracker organ rather than on the humble 8-stop Walker I play at work. Hearing the piece again on Tuesday made me sentimental for the exhilaration of that first ride.

It turned out that the Wednesday organist couldn't play this week, so I took the subbing opportunity and played the Kyrie. I brought my flip camera to see if it would capture the immensity of the sound. It did a decent job under the circumstances (under the manuals, on the floor), though the massive pedal pipes don't shine through the mush at all. For the record, I get nervous when I know I'm being watched, even if it's only by a camera aimed at my feet; this comes through in the performance, yet given how tense my ankles were, my feet look surprisingly boring (spiffy striped socks excluded).

In pottery news, I'm delighted that a photo of one of my teapots was accepted for Lark's second volume of 500 Teapots, due out in August 2013. I actually don't know which teapot, since I submitted two with the same mellifluous title ("Untitled, 2009"), but it'll be one of these two:

In other news, we took a trip to Washington, D.C., over winter break. One of the many museums we visited was the International Spy Museum, where the signs admonished us not to take photographs. At the same time, the exhibits featured multiple real-life spy cameras that had enabled undercover agents to discretely capture intelligence on film. Rebel that I am, I was consequently inspired to snap some illicit photos inside the museum. Of course, I can probably say farewell to a career in espionage after posting the images here, but so it goes.

Pottery photos

The postmark deadline for Lark's new 500 Teapots book is today, and in about ten minutes, I will go to the post office to mail off four photos taken by a friend, professional photographer Adrian Moreno. I also wanted to submit a detail photo for one of the teapots, but I didn't have any from Adrian and--procrastinator that I am--didn't leave time to ask him to take any. Having also procrastinated about that 2010-into-2011 New Year's resolution to build a workable set up for photographing my pots, I ended up spending this morning futzing with my old dented Canon PowerShot A620, trying to get some good close ups. I took the teapot outside for some natural partly cloudy light and took about 100 pictures. I learned a lot about glare and the complete randomness of getting the microphotography feature to actually focus, developed an increasingly steady hand (I was too lazy to get out a tripod, but not too lazy to take 100 photos), and ended up with this:

It looks a little sharper after it's run through an "autocorrect" filter, but the submission guidelines say not to do that, so that's that. I'm impressed by the detail of the crystals; thanks to the photo, I'm noticing details on the pot that I'd never seen before.

In other photograph submission news, I sent some shots of assorted geek pots to the 2012 Bridges conference on math/art intersections, and they were accepted! Charlie Evergreen took the first two photos below. I took the third--yes, I need to work on that photography set up--yet it's the tori that are going into the month-long (vs. conference-long) exhibit in Towson's College of Fine Arts gallery. Just goes to show what happens when mathematicians instead of potters evaluate your work.