In October 2013 we were very fortunate to be awarded a bursary from a-n The artists Company as emerging makers,to explore our mutual use of ceramics. We were looking to generate a new challenge, or explore new directions with the aim to ‘learn the flexibility and negotiation’ that good collaboration is founded on. We also set out a time scale of about a year to produce the work and get it to exhibition.
In summary the first ten months of our collaboration did not go to plan, at all. A slow start with lack of efficient work shop space hindering the production of our own slips. And also a completely different life- style making collaborative time really difficult to achieve.
Even to this point, the hardest obstacle of all in collaborating was to just get started! As close friends, who knew each other well and had many shared interests – this dumbfounded us.
Looking back, we knew we could force the issue and ‘puzzle’ our works to fit each other. Or one of us could have paid lip service to the others idea, but we both wanted to be totally committed.So our first lesson was to learn to support each other and that if we didn’t move forward happily together we ‘failed to collaborate’
Yesterday Katherine and I had our first window to install ‘Congregation’. The collection of nearly 500 cast ceramic vessels now resides at The Congregational Church Blaby. Well for at least for the next five weeks!
The installation went really well, it took about an hour and a half to arrange once we had the church furniture in position. We agreed that having a limited time slot for the photo shoot in February, helped us place the pieces and to achieve a sense of liveliness which we tried to replicate yesterday.
Today we walked in with fresh eyes and needed to adjust only a few key pieces just in time for the Leicester Mercury, our local newspaper to photograph the installation.
The preview is this evening and the exhibition opens to the public tomorrow Saturday 18th April 2015.
During spring 2014 issues in making our slips were resolved. Drying of clay before processing is a must and our custom made ‘Whizzer’, which fits into our drills made easy work of blending our studio made slips. Another necessary purchase were our specific gravity measures, because we were working in separate workshops we needed to be able to verbally share details of slip and its properties . After test firings we decided to make using, a bought in special porcelain slip and two grogged slips in black and white which we made ourselves.
As mentioned in the introduction starting this collaboration had been the sticking point, even at this time we didn’t know what we were going to do with these slips. Katherine had the light bulb moment when she directed our focus on a local church, proposing an installation. I was extremely excited about this as in the last two years at degree I had studied this genre.
Everything became so much easier from that point on. We both researched, we met and shared thoughts on inspirations and possible concept of the work. In no time at all we had the co-operation of the church minister, we had chosen the motif – the tiny communion glasses used by the congregation and the concept of representing the ethos of the Congregational church and its poor beginnings in an installation of cast ceramic vessels. The vessels would be plain on the outside whilst the interior would glimmer, with a colour palette of glazes inspired by water and the sea bed.
The first moulds were made from found object, the tiny 3.5cm communion glass. We commissioned four scaled -up plaster models to be made from drawings. The different scales of vessel would add to the feeling of theatre when installed within the church, which also met our bursary proposal brief, of experimenting with scale.
Glaze tests completed: dates set for the installation, further dates set for the work to travel to The National Centre for Craft and Design as part of ‘Synchronise’ and one of those ‘life’ moments crops up again. The realisation that with Katherine heavily pregnant that the body of work would need to split between us by size of vessel. There was no way Katherine could be handling our large no.5 size mould with 7 pints of slip in it.
