Today is the first day for about a month when it hasn’t rained.
Naturally this prompts two thoughts. The first is that it will be approximately four months before the first notification of a hosepipe ban. It might be an age thing but a hosepipe ban really annoys me. I live on an island. The UK is a group of islands, has been since the Pleistocene. We are surrounded by water. Where are the desalination plants?
The second thought is that as the sun is shining today magazine writers everywhere will be polishing up their dreadful articles about getting ‘beach body ready.’ This is also annoying on several levels. The first is that if you had a real beach body you would have a rocky bottom, sandy footings and a seagull standing on your moss covered beach head. The second is that they are only writing this rubbish to make you feel inadequate so that they can tell their advertisers, who would like to sell you slimming injections, muscle building supplements, tanning lotion and sunblock that they have done their best to help spin the wheels of commerce.
For me I would have been torn between gardening or shopping in the luxurious dryness had it not been for Miniatura, now less than four weeks away. Today finally, after weeks of work, including weeks modelling, and moulding just after the last show, and pouring and rubbing down and a first firing, I got the kiln on for the second time.
Making ceramics of any variety is quite a complicated business. I would like to have been there when the first caveman found out that the mud he had put in the fire, or, possibly, the mud on which he had built the fire, had gone all hard.
Matters have become quite refined and highly specialised since then. I would have to describe myself as an amateur mud baker really. The only formal training I had in doll making was thirty five years ago, when I went without dinners for quite a while to afford to attend a porcelain doll making morning, to see what was involved. I appreciated the basics and ever since then have been making it up, in every sense of the expression.
I keep wanting to make things that I have no idea how to fire in the kiln. My kiln is a top loading septagonal device, encased in metal, lined with grooved firebricks in which sit the elements which heat up electrically. The kiln is thoroughly insulated so that with each heating of the elements, the heat builds until it reaches a temperature that will bend a small ceramic rod which will activate the switch to switch the kiln off.
The parts of the dolls sit on removable shelves. The shelves are round and have just enough space to admit a pair of hands between the shelf and the kiln wall to lower the shelf into position on the shelf below. Between each shelf are cylindrical props. Each shelf has a wash painted on to prevent doll parts welding themselves to the shelf. Additionally each shelf is covered with a thin layer of kiln sand at each firing. The doll parts have to shrink to their final size, the kiln sand is there to help them move.
However, some of the things I want to make are glazed. The glaze cannot lie on the kiln sand; it would stick and emerge gritty. Gritty dolls are no good. Currently I am making kittens, because the cats were so popular.
As you can see the cats are coloured with glazes all over. These are specialist velvet glazes, which fire slightly furryish. It took me a while to work out how to glaze fire the cats without them going gritty. Each cat has a hollow body, into each hole of which fits a wire stringing hook which I have made and embedded in the arm, leg or head. To fire the glazed cats I insert a temperature proof wire through either a body hole or a stringing hook. Either end of the wire is then suspended from a concoction of shelf support towers.
This is fraught with danger. The hooks can fail and the part drop off, leaving a one legged cat and four other parts that match nothing. The wires can relax, dangling cat parts in the sand, the parts can slide together and stick. I could simplify matters and ensure some matches by colouring the cats all the same. I like cats, the whole point of them is that they are all different and, anyway if I made them all the same it would no longer be arty, I’d be verging on commerce, perish the thought.
I’ll be lucky to have one whole cat to my name and I will not know if I do until the kiln has turned itself off, everything has gone cold overnight and most of tomorrow and, at last I can open the kiln. Even then I have put the cats at the bottom of a stack of three and a half shelves, all of which I will have to rescue before I find if I have cats or if I am several kittens short of a posse.
And I haven’t even told you about the very experimental gargoyles.
If you want to see what all the other crazy Miniatura artists are up to, you can find out here www.miniatura.co.uk
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