Fun with Plaster Molds

Now that the Minneapolis Art Show is finished -- and thanks to everyone for making it such a fun success! -- I can start thinking about making new pots again! And that's great because I've got a lot of different projects floating around in my head.

For those of you who don't know, I've been apprenticing with Larry Watson for the past five months. He works in a style far from what I was used to, which has been a great opportunity for both of us to explore new creative possibilities. A couple months ago, I decided to focus my efforts on hand-building. This is new and scary terrain, but I was feeling trapped by my familiarity with the wheel.

The first hand-built pieces I made were ugly, really ugly. And as I surveyed drooping globs of stacked coil, broken slabs, and unidentifiable forms I thought: "This is good."

So further and further I fell into the rabbit hole of hand-built ceramics. Right now, I'm working a lot with plaster molds. This is fun, because I get to work from solid blocks of clay. After I make a mold from the solid clay, I can slip-cast the entire piece which leaves me with a perfectly thin-walled vessel.

Traditionally, when one creates a plaster mold, they'll start with a finished pot/scultpure and then create molds for each half of the object. Instead, I'm making each half separately, which has left me with some pretty funky non-symmetrical shapes!

This week I decided to go all out with a humongous teapot (below). You can see that I start by outlining the profile of the pot, then build up from the outline to create the form. It's kind of an excersize in thinking backwards, and I'm blown away by the grotesqueness of the objects that I've managed to make.

Too much fun...

Edan