Charlotte Walker Art Foundation Degree

These are the first cartons I have glazed. Since they are porcelain, I had the choice of all the stoneware glazes. This one is called shocking pink. I liked the gradient of pink to blue on the sample piece and James also said that on porcelain it forms little pink crystals which I thought sounded really cool. It also reminded me of corals and marine life. I chose to only dip the carton part way in the glaze to create a kind of water line, suggesting fullness and emptiness; on some level I want to represent a draining of the Earth's resources through this. I think it's also nice to have the two different surfaces, the smooth glazed half and the soft matt half. Dipping also creates a clear horizon line as if looking out across a calm sea. I chose 'Dove' because I wanted to see if the cartons work best with subtle colours or stronger ones like shocking pink. It has a matt finish and a kind of grainy pattern. For my third carton I dipped the whole thing in 'chun clear&#

  This week we exhibited our progress in our projects so far. I printed my microscope images as well as some secondary research images and artists, then 'littered' the board with all the little ceramic nerikomi pieces I have made. I wanted it too look kind of overwhelming and busy to reflect the saturation of litter and microplastics in the ocean. I also made a montage of all the bits of plastic I collected at the beach to display along side it, and an arrangement of the larger ceramic pieces that I've done. My working title is 'plastic beach' a reference to the Gorillaz song, and a very real description of the state of our coastlines right now. I also put out my first cast juice carton but decided to take it away after we presented our work so that it wouldn't get broken or stolen, and also because it was only bisque fired and I wanted to glaze it. People seemed to find it interesting and were intrigued by the ceramic carton which I am working on doing lots mor

  As expected, the first carton didn't come out in one piece, but here are the next two that came out. The one on the left is newly out of the mold while the one on the right is completely dry and I have fettled it down, removing all the surface imperfections and seams - it makes such a massive difference. I'm kind of disappointed that the mold had all these little scratches inside, causing raised bumps on the cartons, but it must have happened during the making process when we had trouble separating certain pieces of the mold or when the first juice carton broke and got stuck inside when we were casting it.  They are made out of porcelain so they're very light and fragile. Here's an example of a piece that I found had got broken through poor handling.   I still plan to use all my broken pieces because I can test glazes out on them or display them differently as if it were a deliberate choice that they're damaged or deformed. This is about a weeks worth of cast cart

  Nancy Mckie is an artist I discovered on Instagram. She paints and draws natural imagery and I was particularly interested in her depictions of marine animals. Her paintings have a child-like quality and the brushstrokes are assertive showing confident mark-making that results in bold iconographic images. I like her use of flat colour and selective palettes that seem simple but considered, and her use of lines and pattern creates playful hints at texture and detail.   In my project I have thought about translating geometric and organic patterns onto ceramics, but I have also considered doing something more directly linked to my original idea and illustrating sea creatures a bit like Mckie's and have them as kind of graphic symbols on my porcelain cartons, replacing the product's original marketing with images of the life-forms that are affected by plastic pollution, and I could use the microscope images I took of shrimp larvae as a starting point. I did this little octopus sk

  This cast took more or less all week to complete. Working out where each piece of the mold should go was surprisingly confusing especially on the side with the lid because we had to make sure it would lift out at the right angle without anything breaking off or getting stuck. We had to fill the carton with water to stop it from collapsing under the weight of the plaster and to give an impression of fulness. The first carton actually broke when we tried to remove it so I had to go out and buy another (then quickly drink it all) before we could resume making the mold. In between pouring I had to add lots of layers of wax to stop the plaster sticking to itself, and it took at least half an hour for each block to set enough to pour another side. We decided to leave it open underneath, which is where the slip will be poured into the mold and you could possibly put lights inside which would glow through the porcelain.

  Recently we have been making more of an effort at home to recycle things properly. Tetra paks are difficult to recycle because they are made of different materials; plastic, card and foil. We have been putting our empty cartons aside to take them to the correct place for recycling, so I took some photos of the collection. I think they have an interesting presence when arranged in multiples, strangely they remind me of a huddle of penguins or a crowd at a festival. I think the tower like shape also mirrors modern urban architecture.  Personally I find skyscrapers kind of dystopian and they give me feelings of impending doom as if something could go wrong at any second. They seem oppressive and sinister, a huge pillar of glass and metal. I think the cartons have a much friendlier appearance despite the similarities in shape, and the associations with food create a sense of comfort and domesticity.

 Although I have been quite keen on the idea of creating organic forms based on creatures and plastics found in the sea, I have had an alternative idea that gives me a bit more excitement, but it still relates to the general theme. I went to the shop and bought a carton of tropical juice not thinking much of it. But as I held the object in my hands I realised how interesting the shape was and how nice it felt to hold, and I decided I wanted to cast it. Making replica cartons would be a comment on packaging waste and the on-going litter crisis; using ceramics would change the language of the object and question ideas of the future and permanence. The research and experimentation I have already done will still be useful to me and I hope to use patterns and motifs in reference to that. Consumerism is such a huge issue right now, and one that will affect all our lives in the near future. It is a crisis of sustainability and pollution, and as an artist there are certain moral dilemmas in te

Now that I have a large collection of ceramic test pieces I wanted to go back to 2D work for a moment so I drew some patterns inspired by them with Copic markers. I made geometric patterns based on the nerikomi pieces where I stacked layers of clay together and cut through, as well as organic patterns like the spare coloured clay that I rolled out into swirly flat pieces. My favourite is the red lines against the yellow background because it looks fluid and groovy; I've also been wondering about translating these patterns onto ceramics, for instance using transfers on porcelain or using underglazes. I could also scratch patterns into a glaze revealing the colours underneath.  Although the geometric patterns were originally based on natural forms, I think the organic patterns are more successful in terms of alluding to nature and my theme of the ocean.  

  I used 'chun clear' stoneware glaze to try and bring out the colours of the dyed porcelain. You can see this worked really well on the far left circle but in the others, the glaze looks kind of cloudy. I did try and dip them really fast to stop the glaze being too thick and going like this but I guess it may be cloudy for some other reason like being full of small bubbles. I think they still look beautiful anyway and now I have a better idea of how to create interesting fluid patterns with porcelain/ slip. These smaller pieces also had the cloudy effect on a lot of them, but the colours still look really vivid. Here is a piece that I dipped part way in so I could compare how it looks with and without the glaze. I actually think I prefer the unglazed side because there's something more satisfying to me about the flatness, and the colours and swirly markings are uninterrupted by reflections.

  These are some examples of Nerikomi that I thought were really impressive, it's good to see different ways artists have used the technique because it gives me an idea of the potential it has and the range of effects I could create.  The piece by Francoise Joris is really cool because he seems to have shaved some really thin layers of clay so that they are translucent, and you can see where they overlap. They also have a wave-like sense of movement with the lines running through and the rough edge. Dorothy Feibleman had a lot of really nice examples and the image I chose appealed to me because it reminded me of the celular structures I've been looking at so it makes me think of little ocean life forms. Chez Susan's piece has a similar effect but with more geometric structures that reflect the slightly more mathematical nature of lifeforms such as symmetry and the Fibonacci spiral.

  This time I used my favourite colours from my test pieces and also incorporated plain white porcelain. This is how thin I rolled out the porcelain and then I layered it on top of  each other in an alternating pattern and cut the edges to make it straight before rolling it into a spiral. The problem with this is that the blue was too dry, you can see how it is cracking and not bonding to the white so there's air gaps. It took a lot of rolling out to get rid of the bubbles so it became really thin and long. When I cut it into slices it still had the spiral shape but the lines were wiggly and I think it looks organic but psychedelic. I like the idea of making something quite surreal because the microscopic images I've been looking at have an otherworldly nature. With my leftover cut-offs of blue and white porcelain I rolled them out creating a swirly pattern which I cut shapes out of with cookie cutters so they have really satisfying clean edges. The circular one is my favourite