Sharon Ho creates ceramics, assemblage and photography at the Felt+Ceramics Studio|Shop on Orcas Island. Connect @optimismandco
The idea for this little guy came from the beautiful midnight blue family of jays that lived in the tree next door all summer long. I miss them. The photo does not do enough justice to the actual glaze, which is a deep, dusky charcoal with undercurrents of blue.
Like birdsong in winter, I’ve been too busy sheltering from the cold to throttle about much, but oh, I’ve been busy in the studio making pitchers, and ceramic jewelry (a post on that coming later this week – I have a case made for a Wearble Art show at the Orcas Center, opening this Sat, Dec 1). My newest bird friends will attest to that. Enjoy the next couple of posts. These birds are all very versatile 5-inch tall pitchers that fit snugly in the hand for pouring. Use for milk, olive and nut oils, dressings on your table, or for bath salts, soap or shampoo holders. Food safe glazes and textured wings provide a firm grip.
When I design something, I do think about how it can be used, but this little piece surprised me. Can you tell what this pendant was originally designed for?
Not so successful in its original purpose, I strung it on three waxed cords on a whim, the night before a sale, and sold four of these the next day. Something about the shape, the way it sits on the neckline or where it leads the eye, flatters the wearer. Dare I say sexy? Someone said it had a retro reference, well, an added bonus. It looked good with the bare shoulder styles in tropical Singapore. I left it at that.
On Orcas, where the pacific Northwest summer breeze is more unpredictable, I strung the last pendant in this style on a necklace that I had made using curly knitting wool that I had woven like a ‘friendship band’ in some sections, and it changed the look of the pendant immediately. It can be worn lower on the front, over turtlenecks and sweaters, almost like a long, loose scarf, warm and fuzzy around the neck. Neat. Now I have a versatile accessory that adapts to the seasons. It would be fun to wrap around the waist as a belt buckle too. To think it started life as a napkin ring.
A dish for sushi anyone? Oysters? Chocolate? Chocolate truffles. This set of three started off as an idea for one large, long platter, made by laying and pressing together flattened coils of toasted clay with flattened coils of white. I wanted to test the need to blend the two clays.
The surface texture was meant to conjour up an image of sun-bleached driftwood washed asore and stacked high on the sand bank. The holes add a textural element suggesting porousity and inherent decay, or as if it were being eaten from the inside by some insect. By serendipity, someone knocked the shelf where it sat after bisque firing – and there must have been a fault line because of the minimal blending – but it fell into three separate parts of one long dish and two smaller ones. I sanded it out, applied oxide over the surface, burnished it off and glazed it one colour. Fired. Voila!
Coiling is an handbuilding technique that has been used for centuries to build very strong, hardy functional ware. Here I was playing with flattened coils. Basically, I rolled the clay into long ropes and flattened each rope into a ribbon of clay with a rolling pin. I had to be consistent in rolling out the width of each strip so that whenever I joined the coils to build the shape I wanted, I could seamlessly blend the joints. The effect I wanted was to make the vase look like it was coiled from one looong flat ribbon of clay. Do you see the little lip near the neck of the vase? I designed that so that this piece can also be used as a carafe.
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