Claudia's Studio Updates
Prints on clay, show openings in March, & website updates!
Is it too late to still be saying Happy New Year? I clearly don’t think so! I hope the start of 2024 has you feeling hopeful and renewed.
January marked the start of a new body of work, exploring my relationship with the sun. Growing up in England it’s so drilled into you that if it’s a nice day you should be outside - happy and enjoying it, and that’s the way it made me feel. Yet, after moving to California, I started to find it a little extravagant or gratuitous, just there seemingly every single day. It was the norm, not the exception, and so when I was trying to find my feet in a new place, it felt relentless. I needed time to stay in sometimes, to process my homesickness and to hide away, and so I found myself hoping for the nostalgia and comfort of a rainy day.
These thoughts feel like just the beginning of the project, and I’ve been exploring them through playing with ways to print on clay - it’s both fun and challenging, a real practice in patience to see how things make it through their rounds in the kiln.
At its simplest, printmaking is the use of some sort of matrix or template to transfer an image to another surface. For me this has looked like:
Making card shapes and pressing them into the clay surface using a brayer (roller)
Screen printing directly onto the clay surface with underglazes
Loading a screen with ink and then rolling a clay vessel across the screen
Screen printing onto a gelli plate and then rolling a ceramic vessel across the plate to pick up the ink
Screen printing onto newsprint and then using slip to re-activate the prints and transferring them to clay
Creating a mold and then imprinting the relief parts into a clay slab
I couldn’t have predicted what would or wouldn’t have worked, I’ve found something surprising in every trial. And there’s so many variables to navigate!
I make my ceramic work in community studios which I’m so grateful for! Sometimes I take classes and other times I’m just learning by doing. There’s so much more to grasp though - I’d love to attend a ceramics artist residency at some point (let me know if you’re aware of any good ones.) There’s also joy in being a beginner and not really knowing the rules and boundaries so you accidentally overstep them all the time.
Save the dates
I’ll be sharing some of my new works in an exhibition Home Away From Home at Bell Projects, March 2nd-31st, alongside the very talented Virginia Diaz Saiki and Lucy Holtsnider. The opening reception is Saturday, March 2nd, 6-10pm, and there’ll also be a print demo on Saturday, March 30th, 12-2pm. This is part of Denver’s Mo’ Print.
I’ll also have a piece at ArtGym’s members show, opening reception on February 22nd, 6-9pm, and I have a couple of older ceramic works currently on view at Lakewood Cultural Centre.
And now, some things I’ve enjoyed recently…
Read:
Signs and Symbols of the Sun, by Elizabeth S. Helfman, first published in 1974, explores how different civilizations have represented or engaged with the sun over time.
Watch:
Fargo, Season 5, was SO good! And the longer it is since we finished it, the better I think it was.
Cook:
Tenderheart: A Cookbook - when visiting our excellent friends in California, Violet and Jered, we cooked from it together. They gifted it to us for Christmas (with the most beautiful inscription) and tonight I think we’re going to make the Sticky Gochujang Brussel Sprouts, with a fried egg on top.
I know they were first introduced to the book by a friend, and I’ve since recommended it to others (looking at you Ky!), so we’re all in a delightful cookbook chain together.
Listen:
NTS Field Recordings, when you need company but you don’t want it to be human.
Look:
I updated my website with some of the pieces from my solo show, go check it out.
And that’s it! As always, thanks for reading : )
You are so creative and talented! I love how your brain can think of so many ways to transfer a print onto clay 🙃 I also love seeing how you made that sun face! So cool. You’re so cool!
I love this clay exploration. Thanks for sharing the trials. My memories of clay are failing miserably at the wheel throwing and coil pots that collapsed from being too moist. I've been thinking of trying clay as well with simple shapes and my own color glazes. I'm daunted by the trials of it all as my sister has a degree in ceramics - soooo much to learn. These are all so fab, congrats on moving forward. And there's a place in Helena, Montana that does Clay. Archie Bray foundation.
My sister did classes there one summer and lived in a covered wagon.