Tag Archives: ornament

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This week’s entry is actually the end of a several week long process where I experimented with a different method for forming.

This is an idea I’ve been wanting to try ever since seeing a website by a British artist who made life size human figures out of wire.  His name is regretfully forgotten, and the link to his website lost.  What I remember the most – besides the wonderful realism of his figures – was that he built them over a solid core, which was later burned out.

Cores are often used with metal clay for making hollow forms such as boxes or beads.  After some research, I bought some cork clay, and then promptly got too busy to go any further.

Cork clay is usually burned out in a kiln.  Since I’m not interested in making a substantial investment for something I may not stick with, I started researching low-tech alternatives.  I remembered a thread on Ganoksin about using a flower pot kiln for burning out wax.  The Ganoksin archives, while vast and wide-ranging, are frustrating to search, and didn’t provide anything really helpful.  Evenually, I found some basic information elsewhere online for building a flower pot kiln and went about collecting the materials to build one.

I wasn’t sure if the kiln would get hot enough to burn out the cork clay, so I made my first core out of bread dough.  Since it was just an experiment, I opted to do a freeform winding of copper wire around the core.

Finding an unglazed clay pot of an appropriate size in January in Canada is a challenge.  However, I did find one – and only one – at Home Depot.

Once back at home, I lined the pot with tin foil, set up the hotplate on my back deck, put a modified coffee can on the element, added the piece to be fired, covered it, and turned it on.

It smoked a lot, and stunk to high heaven, but considering it was in -12°C and blowing gusts, it worked very well!  The core-free wire looks a bit like a peanut.

Because with the YOJP, a finished piece is supposed to be submitted each week, I decided to also try my hand at making some leaves with fold forming, which were then patinated using salt & ammonia.  They were attached to the peanut and presto! a finished piece.

It’s not pretty, but it wasn’t intended to be.    My next step will be to try again with the cork clay.

Process photos: