ICF invited UK universities and Higher Education institutes running ceramic courses to nominate active students to be Student Demonstrators at the Festival. These students will give a demonstration of a ceramic technique or process that will take place at a dedicated work space in a marquee on site.
Sponsored by Potclays and Potterycrafts
STUDENT DEMONSTRATORS 2023
Nandini Chandavarkar – Cardiff Metropolitan University
As a feminist ceramic artist hailing from India, my work centres around the exploration of the fragmented female body through printed ceramics. Being a woman in my country, I have experienced first-hand how a patriarchal society views the female form as objectified and fragmented. My aim is to challenge traditional perspectives on identity and gender norms and examine the postcolonial commentary between India and the West through image, colour, and clay. Combining ceramics and analogue printmaking techniques, my approach subverts feminine tropes to highlight the fragmented female form. By creating a ‘blurred’ aesthetic facilitated by the kiln, the diffused ceramic surface conveys the tacit illusion of the feminine through the discernible ‘pulling away’ of my sense of identity and the gaze.
During the demonstration, I will showcase my process in three stages – leather hard, bisque, and glazed. I will begin by demonstrating how to create a monoprint on leather-hard tiles. This will involve working directly on the clay surface by hand, and transferring a feminine figure outline using paper towels and cobalt slip. Next, I will duplicate the same mark-making process onto the printed bisque ware tile, using a form of relief printing with newspaper and cobalt, copper and iron oxide washes. This will result in an off-centered, blurred image, further emphasizing the fragmented nature of the female form. Finally, digital decals will be applied onto the glazed tile, adding additional layers of meaning and subverting the gaze by presenting the exploitation of my body.
Through my work, I hope to bring attention to the objectification and fragmentation of the female body, and provoke conversations surrounding the gaze, gender, identity, and cultural appropriation.
Maggie Rose David – Cardiff Metropolitan University
My work celebrates the conversation between humans and technology, capturing self-identity and the life (and soul) of the calculated machine. The demonstration will showcase this conversation, how technology within art and making is not always what viewers imagine it to be, to broaden the ideas of what these tools can bring to the wider creative industry and extend the possibilities of 3D printing within mainstream ceramics. Each stage of my making process will be on show within the demonstration, the first being the hand building of forms:
I am using human coiling as a ‘foil’ to highlight the technological coiling of the printer, using burnished terracotta to provide a striking contrast to the underglazed stoneware of the machine. This twinning of processes, emphasises connections between the human and the printed work, challenging the ideology that technology within art and creativity is soul-lacking and uncreative. The printed element will be celebrated through the live printing of the forms where onlookers will be able to witness the machine producing work that shifts and changes. Where spherical files are printed onto uneven surfaces to create distortions and celebrate the agency of the process and material, allowing the machine to make ‘mistakes’. Most assume that technology does not have a soul or life. I argue with my work that these mistakes, of allowance of gravity and movement, represent the machines ‘soul’. The printer continues to print while the clay moves due to its own weight. The material agency is on full show as the tool uncovers the personal side of technology.
I will also present finished works where the hand made and printed coils interact, which will start conversations into the place of technology within creative industries. Allowing me to engage with wider communities and share the exciting process I’m hugely passionate about.
Sam Lucas – Sunderland University
Sam Lucas is a ceramic artist, who creates ambiguously figurative forms. She does not make pretty things; her work explores the idea of being in the body and social awkwardness, being, rather than being seen, and vulnerability and uncertainty, but with a dark humour. Her practice is driven by her own personal experience and observations of others throughout her life.
Since graduating from BA ceramics at Cardiff in 1990, she has been working in the creative arts and ceramics department at a specialist college for young people with complex needs and autism in Gloucestershire. After completing the MA ceramics at Cardiff in 2018, she was a finalist in AWARD, the headlining exhibition at British Ceramics Biennial 2019 and this work was exhibited with Taste Contemporary Gallery at Art Geneve 2020 and later in the year she was selected for the Crafts Council Hothouse programme. In 2021 she began undertaking an AHRC funded part time practice-based PhD at Sunderland university with Northern Bridge Consortium in ceramics and wellbeing. Sam’s research is exploring the diversity in experience and how creativity, especially in clay can be used as a coping strategy to aid mental health.
During the Festival I would like to create a circular totem pole in sections in terracotta clay. Each section would be around 30cm wide x 30cm high and can be placed one upon another after firing. Alongside this I would encourage visitors to create a small personal object in clay (similar to effigies or amulets) following along the theme of ‘My body in my hands’ encompassing bodily experience, which can be placed in small recesses cut into the totem pole sections and encourage them to write a few words about it.
Rob Towler – Central St Martins
Rob Towler is a potter whose work seeks to explore and innovate established making techniques in the British slipware tradition, through the capturing of a variety of patterns drawn in liquid clay. Rob uses his experience of urban farming as a point of inspiration, especially the predictable yet uncertain nature of the seasons that exists when working on and with the land, embracing variation in the surface decoration of his work.
I will demonstrate a range of slip application techniques, focussing largely on the complete submergence of still leather hard pots. the hurdles I’ve had to navigate with this method of application and solutions I have worked out using tools and items typical to the garden shed. As I apply slip to the entirety of my pots at the same time, some areas require masking off with wax emulsion. Some of these masked areas also serve a purpose as place holders for wadding, which I was explore later in the demonstration. Using a slip trailer to introduce black slip to a bucket of white slip. Demonstrating the limitless potential for variety of patterns and designs before submerging the pot fully. Then demonstrating how to handle these pots once coated, so not to interfere with the immediacy of the surface. For example the requirement to dry plates quickly when slipping both faces. This will be demonstrated on a banding wheel and be dried either with a flame or heat gun, also exploring the limits of how much to dry these pots before putting them aside. I’ll bring a few bisque fired examples to demonstrate glazing, waxing and the wadding of these pots before a glaze firing as this is also important to my ability to glaze my pots even on surfaces facing the kiln shelf.
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Submission Process [closed 5 May 2023 ]
ICF are inviting UK universities and Higher Education institutes running ceramic courses to nominate active students to be a Student Demonstrator at the Festival. These students will give a demonstration of a ceramic technique or process that will take place at a dedicated work space in a marquee on site during scheduled times over the weekend. This is an excellent opportunity to promote the facilities and courses on offer and allow potential students to showcase both the institution and their own practice.
This opportunity is offered in partnership with Potclays Ltd and sponsored by Potterycrafts Ltd.
Download the full details and application form here – closing date 5 May 2023.
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PAST 2019 STUDENT DEMONSTRATORS
Elin Hughes
BA Ceramics, Cardiff Metropolitan University
Workshop: Throwing and (de)constructing
‘I am interested in examining the traditional process of throwing on the potter’s wheel through a contemporary frame of deconstructing and re-configuring thrown forms. I slice, fracture and mutilate the thrown surfaces, turning shapes inside out to explore tension in the clay in order to build dynamic sculptural vessels. I would like to demonstrate both halves of my making process. Firstly, the throwing of what I call my sculptural components and secondly the constructing together of these sections when leather hard. This second half is an exciting, unpredictable process as I work with the nuances of each new vessel form, improvising and working in response to the clay’s shifting centre of gravity.’
Natasha Parker-Edwards
BA(Hons) Creative Arts: Art and Dance
Bath School of Art and Design
Natasha aims to integrate aspects of her contemporary dance practice into the field of 3D contemporary art. Investigating the world in a psychogeographical manner, she aims to explore materials and surfaces in relation to the human body, primarily using the sense ‘touch’. Her sculptural, performance based work comments on her own angsts and investigates the dialogue between the process of making and the human action. She is currently interested in questions like ‘In what ways are the boundaries we place around art-forms imagined or real?’ and ‘How might exploring work that exists on the edges or crossing these boundaries open up new creative possibilities?’.
Natasha will be presenting ‘Femme Maison (After Bourgeois)’ during lunchtimes in the Theatre on Saturday and Sunday. She plans to stay in and around Bath or Bristol once she graduates with goals to develop the piece further. She also wants to continue teaching and participating in collaborative projects and hopes her creative endeavors will allow her to travel in the near future.
Femme Maison (After Bourgeois)
‘I need to make things. The physical interaction with the materials has a curative effect. I need the physical acting out, I need to have these objects in relation to my body’ Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010).
Take a glimpse into the world of French-American artist and sculptor Bourgeois, through this movement response to some of her key works. The multidisciplinary piece is driven by Bourgeois’ themes of gender, domesticity, sexuality and desire. She obsessed over ‘the house’ and how architecture symbolises a social world that attempts to define individuals in contrast to the inner world of emotion – ideas which are interwoven with my own angst as a young woman moving into adulthood.
Ross Andrews
MRES Ceramics.
Cardiff School of Art and Design
WORKSHOP: Digital craft in collaboration with traditional hand-skill process.
Ross is investigating questions of embodiment in terms of the extended ‘reach’ afforded through technologies such as the internet. His practice took shape through the combination of digital technology, 3D modelling software, CAD and the analogue traditional skills of mould making and casting ceramics. This work directly takes digitally captured terrain, in this instance the Welsh valleys of the Brecon Beacons and translates it into a vessel. The demonstration will show the skill of pouring and opening a plaster mould, refining of pre-cast and fired examples as well as a video demonstration of the digital process behind the 3D printed objects.
“I have always been inspired by architecture and means of digital extension within making alongside traditional craft methods. Through studying in a multi-disciplinary degree course, we were encouraged to explore through making and gain a broad knowledge of materials and an alchemic methodology of mixing processes and materials. My practice took shape through the combination of digital technology, 3D modelling software, CAD and the analogue traditional skills of mould making and casting of ceramic,metals with the addition of wood. To produce pieces of work that challenge contemporary ideas of craft and the handmade with the hybrid landscape of digital craft. Only after this 3 years of exploration, did I then focus on the medium of ceramics.Through undertaking my research, it has meant my practical making has taken a less fundamental role within my practice. Although I am still making and I believe that making helps me progress my thinking, When the hands are working, the mind is free to think and contemplate the thoughts and arguments that surround my research.”
Supported by the Arts Council of Wales and Potclays Ltd
