Pottery For Preston

ByJoseph Travis

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.

Watch this Space…

ByJoseph Travis

So I was going through some pots in storage a few weeks ago and pulled out this lidded jar. It really caught my eye and I can’t stop looking at it, it is one of the last things I made before my youngest child was born. I have a feeling something similar to this will be on the cards again. They give a good variety of surfaces to carve, decorate and play with and I would like to get them into a saggar too, perhaps with a bit less decoration and let the saggar do all the work.

Recent Tiles

ByJoseph Travis

For a while I have been thinking about tiles as an act of experimentation, they are something that can be created in the fraction of time for throwing, there is a lot less focus that goes into creating them, no hunching over the wheel.  In some ways they are quite disposable. I don’t generally use tile for glaze tests as they don’t have gravity and thickness’s similar to pots but I do use them to test ideas, patterns, new  and more recently my saggars to see what effects are possible.  In these sorts of ways the tiles are part of…

More Saggars

ByJoseph Travis

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.