Mounted Ball
Mounted Ball
Mounted Ball is in the ” Art of The State” at the Pennsylvania State Museum of Art. It won first place for Craft. I throw my forms on a wheel and fire them without glaze using a bare clay technique called horsehair raku. Building multiple forms from different clay bodies for one piece, lets me blend pink, yellow ocher and neutral color together. The highly burnished forms take a month or longer to create. After the forms are burnished, they are bisque and gold fired. The final phase is the primal creative experience for me. It is a very fast and fluid process. The kiln is raised to 1800 degrees Fahrenheit. I watch for heat radiant cues on the ware to pick the exact moment to stop the firing and immediately reduced with Horsehair. I am drawn to the intimate and painterly approach of horsehair reduction. The carbon from the hair embeds into the burnished layers of the clay resulting in translucent planes of line and smoke in the surface.