Kim Colebrook - Ceramics

Last week I set up my work for assessment - it was a great opportunity to reflect on what I have done so far and the direction that I should travel in moving towards the next module! So - I'm looking at working on the spaces left behind and the "lay of the land" before and after - casting and polishing! Also exploring ways of using my geological clay in new ways. To start the ball rolling I picked up some huge pieces of coal from Ffros-y-Fran - thanks for the generous donatio

Last weekend I went to Llantarnam Grange Arts Centre to the opening of Zoe Preece's exhibition Material Presence. It is brilliant. The quality of making is refined and beautiful, and the work sits in domestic arrangements, encouraging you to look at the ordinary in depth, to allow memories to enter your mind, transporting you to other parts of your life. Her work has balance and equilibrium, authoritative statements about being human, with the porcelain and walnut honouring t

I came across the beautiful, delicate work of Alison Gautrey - www.alisongautrey.com who makes delicate cast forms that vibrate as they sit on a shelf, by adding the clay whilst turning the mould on a wheel. Her colours are subtle and the overall effect is stunning - so I decided to have a go! Lots of my work refers to cores of the earth that are extracted to give us an insight into the geological structures beneath our feet - so these simple(?) forms could hint at the geolog

Well, this week I've been experimenting with placing dried clay into water - how does it collapse, how long does it take, is there any difference when its been fired to 100, 200 or 300 degrees C? Have a look! This block of cast porcelain was just fired to 100 degrees C - it collapsed in an elegant way, creating delicate feathers and slithers. The water seeps into the clay, and you see sudden collapses. The collapsing links with the collapse of the coal industry - how to use t

Another thing that I've been doing is casting loads of blocks of porcelain coal - here are some that have been fired and glazed - but the ones I'm doing now have a different future. The new ones will only be fired to 100, 200 and 300 degrees C - usually they go to 1260 degrees. This will mean that they are still clay and not ceramic - i.e. their structure can still be changed. The small heating will just remove water from within the structure - and this will allow me to test

You might ask. These blocks of solid porcelain will hopefully inspire the next step of exploration. How, I hear you ask? Well, they may be blocks of porcelain but they each bring together 2 different porcelains - each of which will have a different shrinkage level. It might only be 1% difference but this should result in cracks and tears in the blocks when they have been high fired - which to me will begin to create thoughts of stress and coping - mirroring the challenges tha

So - its been a month away from making (won't bore you with the details) - but it's been a great time for thinking, planning and getting ready for assessment. My starting point for my MA was all about using the attributes of clay to bring narratives of south Wales to life, and to allow other people to find there own meanings within the work. So my reading has been about meaning, semiotics - even going back to reading Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge, where he explored

I've made a plaster version of a piece of coal! It's interesting - the same form but the material has changed - does the form define a piece of coal - no the material - but the form is important and so a plaster version can be confusing. The detail in the plaster is fantastic - and when cast in porcelain, what will the values be? Ideas include different clays, clays with feldspar creating the shine that you get on coal, different oxides, cutting pieces in sections - maybe hid