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| Rosemary O’Neill | |
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It began with the discovery of a Korean vessel in a museum; a large simple form, its only decoration a bold hand-sweep of slip, clearly showing the finger trails of its maker. Then I discovered the simple pleasure of slopping slip onto a pot with a soft brush - the luscious feel of the slip, the brush sitting loosely in the hand, the serendipitous nature of the results. It all felt good.
Playing around with this deceptively simple technique and researching its historical precedents in the punch’ong pottery of Choson dynasty, Korea, filled my first year in the Diploma of Art, Ceramics at Chisholm Institute of TAFE. Some of my first successes were small lidded pots in a cocktail mix of clays, with a white porcelaineous slip applied with a stiff brush - hakeme style - fired unglazed in the bag wall of Chisholm’s bourry box. Then came a couple of bottle forms, out of the same warm- coloured stoneware mix, white slip oozed over them with a soft brush and celadon applied over the top. The glaze pooled deliciously, highlighting the subtle changes of depth and colour beneath.
Other experiments in technique followed - stiff brush, soft brush; with glaze or without; wood or gas; white on white for textural interest or white slip on iron-bearing clay for colour variation and so on. But second year of the Diploma and the need to create a cohesive body of work around a theme brought all this experimentation sharply into focus. My aim was to combine my interest in slip decoration, and in the loose, simple forms of the punch’ong pottery, with my concern with the fallibility of language as a means of communication. The sensual pleasure of slopping slip around was no longer enough - it had to mean something.
The bottle forms entitled Lost in the translation emerged as one response to these criteria. They address the notion that we all speak a private language and that, as a result, in each conversation some degree of meaning is inevitably lost. Thrown in a dark clay (Walkers No.6) the bottles are covered with scribbles that suggest words, but are obscure, indecipherable, The “scribbles” are incised into the turned, leather-hard pot with a ball stylus and white porcelaineous slip is brushed over the pot, then scraped off with a metal kidney when sufficiently dry, revealing the incised marks.
Although many of the ingredients remain the same (the brushing on of slip, the Korean feel of the bottle form, the celadon glaze on the inside), the feel of these bottles is very different to their soft, slip-draped antecedents. With their scraped, unglazed surface they are harder, more raw - appropriate perhaps to the emotional impact of the basic human frailty they seek to express.
Wonder Slip
A white porcelaineous
slip recipe given to me by Colin Clark (for which he credits John Glick).
Equal parts by volume of:
ball clay
silica
kaolin
potash feldspar
plus 3.5% of a fine borax frit (eg Ferro 4110)
Celadon Glaze
whiting 16.07
nepheline syenite 39.29
kaolin 8.93
silica 25.00
found clay (terracotta) 7.50
Red iron oxide (0.50) or yellow ochre (1.5) can be substituted for
the found clay.
