Concentration #8

Commentary to come

Concentration #7

Drip Drop Gooey Drop.
This black substance is a pain to clean up and mop.
There have been massive kills;
birds, economies, and sea life--dead because of our spills.
We use it daily, weekly, monthly-so often we don't even think
--Will our dependence on this bring civilization to its brink?

What am I?

             I hoped you enjoyed that little riddle as an introduction to my 7th Concentration piece. In case you haven't figured it out or didn't feel like trying (shame on you!), the answer is oil. Ah yes, one of Industry's dirtiest chemicals and something we come in contact with everyday. Especially in the United States, where we consume 18.5 million barrels per day, according to a 2012 study. We practically ooze oil out of our pores: and that is the imagery that was the inspiration for my piece.

I decided to make a mushroom with half of the mushroom top oozing and dripping oil down it's surface. Here's the original sketch

I messed around with the form for the mushroom top before figuring out which way was going to work as well as doing a quick start on the stem of the mushroom.

I really didn't like the way the slab method was looking so I started the form over with a pinch pot, and used newspaper underneath to support it and help shape it. That went along so much better and had a much more rounded shape on top, which would more suitable for the oil portion of the piece.

I then added a ton of clay, layering it over each other, so that it looked extremely blob-y and bulb-ish. At the same time I wanted to get the dimensions that it was running off a little bit so I went to find a reference photo. As you can see below the individual blobs were looking really chunky.

I actually had a hard time getting the right thickness in the images I was looking for-I didn't have success when I typed in oil dripping into google. So I was excited and enthralled when I saw this picture of liquid gold.

So I went back to add clay and manipulate the blobs so the shape would look like it was dripping more accurately and not be as angular looking. I need to shave off a lot of the chunkier parts of the blob to make it look like it was flowing smoothly. I also just wanted to add a lot more textural elements to it.

Here I started to take a sculpting tool and define the undersides of the individual blobs.

Scraped out the insides and actually got to know what Maria feels like sometimes as I did poke a hole once or twice while thinning it out and had to go back and patch it up.

 I opted to sculpt the top and the bottom each separately and not attach them, so that way I could place the mushroom top onto the stem after it was fired and also have the potential to work with glue and other binding agent in case I had difficulties having the stem supporting the weight of the top.

I wanted my base/stem of the mushroom to look very whimsical so I wanted to be very curvy and leaning. However, because it was the support of the very heavy oil-ized top, I had to fiddle around with it a lot so that it would look whimsical while still supporting the weight. So my solution to add weight to the opposite side was to sculpt some rocks.

 I was constantly placing the top on top of the stem to best estimate the weight.

I wasted the mushroom half of my mushroom top to be very textured and kinda flaky on the edges so I took a needle tool and did a quick etch job before smoothing everything out to be fired.

Reflection:
Love love love the way the top of this piece turned out. While I was trying to even out the weight when making the step I did a lot of coil work and scratching attaching but we had some concerns about it exploding in the kiln(which would have been absolute awful) so Ms. Ferguson offered to help me with another one. I started to sculpt a little "pool" of oil, so that it would look the drops had collected underneath part of the mushroom, However I ended up scrapping it which I'm kinda regretting now, so that might be a quick ten minute sculpt before our last bisque firing happens this week! Man that AP deadline is coming up fast! Also, I will soon be updating here with my 8th-10th concentration pieces, so be sure to look!