Kaolineck

Artist Statement

My ceramic piece, Kaolineck(ing), demonstrates a step in the process of sintering, where atoms travel away from the pores of the clay along the grain boundaries where they form necks, touch, create bonds that mechanically strengthen the clay by decreasing porosity, and undergo phase change from solid to another solid through kiln firing at high temperatures in the absence of melting. This is a crucial step in pottery making to create the mechanically durable bisqueware that allows ceramics to survive for so long.

This piece was unintentional. It was supposed to be a trial run for a different final project idea to demonstrate plasticity, so I was playing around with bending and stretching and elongating the piece. I almost discarded it but kept it as a backup. Then, when talking about what I had learned in class for an assignment, I recalled a critical step of pottery making: sintering. And I realized that the piece I had already made is a good representation of the necks which form during sintering. So, I altered its purpose and glazed it as though the white neck was coming off of the brown body or “pore space.” Given more time, my piece would have two similar pots with necking forms to demonstrate the bonding; instead, it is displayed with a mirror to portray the two necks touching to represent sintering.

This process taught me that collaborative thinking or thinking out loud helps me develop new meanings for the pieces I wasn’t planning for. Furthermore, I learned that creativity and art are not linear processes; they are not a straightforward line of planning and execution. Random, unexpected things happen, ideas evolve, and missteps occur, but they can often be turned around into something else.

The processes clay undergoes allow ceramics to serve as analogs to various geologic processes including sintering, contact metamorphism, and polymorphism. Throwing and building with the clay gave me hands-on experience with the differences in clays and exemplified the scientific properties that influence ceramics. The geologic aspect of ceramics allowed me to consider the context of my art/medium and gain an understanding of each component of ceramics including the clay itself, forming it, firing it, glazing it, refiring it and how they all come together and impact the finished piece. I learned how scientific ideas inform pottery on molecular to global scales and that pottery in itself has many comparable analogs to geologic processes. Scientific properties impact the creation of ceramics because they inform the formation of the clay and how it is handled until it is finished.