Seminar Ceramics

The first month of the new year brings us 4 weeks of seminars. These seminars are about technical and theoretical improvement and they give us the opportunity to try something that is not in our subject package. Since this is a collaboration program between teachers of all departments, students from all departments can participate together in mixed classes. A few examples of the offered seminars for the 1st year students of the Product Design department are: pouring synthetic or plastic materials, bending metal, making a short animated movie, photoshop course, binding books, making paint from pigments, clay, ceramics.

Ceramics is a nice 3D exorcise and since making a reservation for using the ovens at school takes at least one month, I figured it would be nice to try something of which I would probably not take the initiative of doing it. The seminar ceramics started at the second week and it has ended at the end of the third week (yesterday).

The assignment we got was: make a sculpture of a (part of a) fruit or vegetable and add a contrasting form to it. Minimun size: 60 x 60 x 40 cm. Get inspiration of your studying department (in my case Product Design) and/or background/roots. Rough Chamotte Clay weight and cost: 1 pack = 10kg = 10 euro's.
The teacher explained to us that actually everything can be a contrasting form, but she said there were good ones and bad ones. The bad ones don't have any relationship between ech other and don't look interesting or funny. The good ones instead activate you to think about the relationship between the (two) forms and can sometimes even be ridiculous or bizarre. But opinions can differ always...
Another important thing: we had to build our fruits or vegies  as if it was an architectural building. The other teacher (there were two) learned us how to make supporting beams like archs and flying buttresses. Using this method the sculptures wouldn't get too heavy and easier to transport.

Oxheart Cabbage

Construction side 1

Construction 1

Construction side 2

Relief of Oxheart Cabbage

Almost finished Oxheart Cabbage

Finished Oxheart Cabbage front

Finished Oxheart Cabbage back

Finally my Oxheart Cabbage bacame 30 x 50 x 80 cm, needed 4 packs of clay and weighted 40kg.
At the end of the assignment it appeared that the teacher wanted us to make the whole fruit or vegetable and add a cliche contrasting form to it, which was a little disappointing.
But altogether it was a very exciting seminar where we learned how to treat and dry the clay.