2023 was a year of so much growth and creative exploration for me in my ceramic practice. I began designing and using stencils to make detailed and textural surface patterns. This opened a huge door of opportunity, allowing me to build bodies of work with central themes and motifs.
Throughout the year of designing stencils and hours and hours spent meticulously glazing those designs, I came to a few realizations. The first being that I love the glazing process and seeing the patterns come to life. The second realization is that this time consuming process is one that might be better adapted for nonfunctional, decorative work. Spending a full day glazing a mug only to have that mug break during daily use, as mugs do, seems a bit wasteful of time, energy, and of course money.
All that said, I started to think about how I can use my new found love of surface pattern design, hand painting, and ceramics in a less breakable, more permanent art form. I thought of the ceramic and sculptural artists who make beautiful installations you see in galleries and as focal points of high end homes. This didn’t feel like the right avenue for me, however, as I view my work as being more pedestrian, less austere. This is around the time our good friends were moving into a house they had just bought and renovating their kitchen. It got me thinking about tile backsplash. This, tile backsplash, tile floor, tile murals, felt like something I really wanted to explore.
So, this winter I am devouring as much information as I can about tile. I’ve read about the Cuerda Seca method of using a stained wax resist to create designs on a tile surface. This allowed you to pool glaze between the wax lines and create multicolored designs that have a crisp linework as you see in my most recent pots that I have been making. I am gathering the ingredients and tools necessary to make this technique possible in my studio, and am so excited to start on some small scale murals. I can’t wait to see where this all leads me in 2024.