Pinhole means handmade! You know... anytime a ceramic industry person visits my studio, they cant believe I make such a clean and design-y looking product in such a small space and by one person. My pieces look like they were factory made, as opposed to crafty looking. Even though I am making in a small artist studio I am not throwing on a wheel, (think the famous scene in Ghost), which takes great skill BTW, but just not what I was going for. In ceramics its difficult to make products in a series, that look all the same, if you dont have conditions that are consistent. Any tiny variation of temperature in the kiln, or a tiny speck of rust falling into your bucket of glaze, can ruin a whole batch of product. Factories have systems in place, machines and people to make sure these things dont happen, and sometimes they still do. Its also rare that one person would have all of the skills necessary to design models, then make moulds of those models, then cast from those moulds, then clean them up the casts (fettling), then dip glaze by hand, and finally apply decals. In factories you train to learn only one of these things. Everything Ive done in the last 10 years has led up to being able to do this. So if a tiny air bubble gets trapped in my liquid clay and raises to the surface resulting in a little dimple on the glaze, instead of freaking out like I used to, I just realise its part of the handmade/small studio process.
Posted on: Sun, 16 Nov 2014 18:15:26 +0000
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