Eagle eyed viewers of the site will have noticed this week the reappearance for the projects tab. I am proud to announce the beginnings of the Red Fox Pottery Lending Library.
Launching the library has taken the same amount of time for a normal blog entry, so please go to the Library and look at the first few pieces to be adopted.
Staggered stumbling starts words awkwardly twist not forming cohesively stopping any progress -Red Fox Poet Writing for the lending library I sat each piece on my desk, I measured it, entered the technical data. I had made each one, I knew them intimately by the time I came to the story I didn’t have to think too hard. So within a few hours I had written over ten thousand words, without much pausing to think.
“boredom haunts me as I work, I fear it will destroy me. I want to be better than my fears” -a note in my sketchbook. Not all old ideas and thoughts are comfortable. Putting them out into the world makes me feel uncertain like I am giving away too much. As for the date if this particular quote it is between January and December 2014. Finding this quote reminds me that I haven’t been happy with my work for some time. I am at the uncomfortable stage of being a maker where I am very aware of how bad I…
I was recently commissioned to make pottery for the Harris Museum in Preston, the pottery will be available for sale through the Harris Museum. There are six pots each has a section of the views of Preston, so each covers about 60 degrees of the view, which is carved through white slip on terracotta. The windows also have white gold lustre to make them stand out further. It was an amazing job to work on, it unfortunately came up in the middle of my youngest being diagnosed as a Type 1 diabetic, but that’s a completely different story.
At the moment it is the children’s summer holidays which means I have to wear my Dad hat a lot more. We went away to a camping barn and the children had fun staying in “a little house” as my youngest put it. Oddly while I was away some interesting things happened. For one we had the first piece of writing for the lending Library this is mug 17 that was given away to a member of my writing group. I love the connections other people make that I never would have found by myself. The second thing that happened…
So this week I made some prototype saggar formers and saggars, I mixed my own clay with sawdust, grog from broken pots and some molochite for added strength. Now if I didn’t have a deadline I would let them dry over two weeks, but I had a deadline so I force dried overnight and fired the next day so you will see some cracks in the larger saggar. Also if you want to make a saggar former don’t leave such big gaps as the clay can get stuck in them making the harder to remove.
A video posted by Joseph Travis (@redfoxpottery) on Aug 16, 2015 at 4:51am PDT Recently I keep trying to write about the work of Ayumi Horie, James Gurney, Austin Kleon and so on. But every piece I write becomes torrid and dry, or it becomes a gushing piece “they are amazing”, “aren’t they creative” or “aren’t they really driving their work on”. I once wrote a piece about how annoyed I was about a particular ceramics writer always started a piece of writing about where he had come across the makers work; it became 100% about him rather than about…
