My flask looks like a testicle and I think I have to keep it
Okay so this is a serious question disguised as a joke.
I've been doing these tall necked bottles for a couple months now, hand built, pinch and coil, and the whole point for me is the lean. I want them to look like they're standing up against a wind. So I make the belly off balance on purpose, right.
Pulled one out of the kiln this morning and the belly went further than I planned and now it is, no way around it, a scrotum. Two of them actually, side by side, my wife walked past and didn't even say anything, just looked at me.
Here's the thing. I could break it. It's a waste of a good firing, it's shino, it came out this beautiful burnt orange and there's a spot near the shoulder where the glaze crawled and it looks like a scar. Genuinely the best surface I've got all month.
But do I put it on the table at the market next Saturday? I sell at Ruzafa. I've got a card that says "vessels" on it. Somebody's kid is going to point at it and say something and I'll have to stand there with my face doing whatever it does.
And honestly the other part of me thinks that's the piece. The one that's actually alive. Everything else on the table is polite and this one makes people react before they decide to.
Am I overthinking this. Does anyone else keep the accident on purpose or do you all just quietly break it in the bucket and never mention it.
3
4commentsSaveFollow threadShare
The lean is a real problem to solve and I think you already know the answer, which is that you break it. Not because of what it resembles, but because the resemblance is telling you the form drifted. A belly that reads as two masses side by side has lost the single directional thrust that makes a leaning bottle work. The eye reads symmetry where you wanted asymmetry, and once it does, no amount of glazing will talk it out of it.
That said, I'd photograph it first. Not to keep and not to post. Just to have the record of what the clay did, because the kiln is the only honest critic you'll ever have and its notes are worth keeping. I throw nothing and hand build almost everything, and I've got a shelf of failures I look at more than the successes.
Two months in is early. The lean will come. It usually arrives the moment you stop chasing it and start measuring the wall thickness instead.
The "photograph it first" part is the good advice here. I do this with failed mosaic panels, keep the photo, smash the thing, and two years later the photo is where the next piece comes from. The object is a dead end, the record is not.
But I half disagree on the break. A split belly isn't automatically a lost form. I've set enough uneven stone to know that a mass that looks wrong on day one sometimes only looks wrong because it's not finished yet. What would decide it for me is whether the two volumes are doing anything to each other. If the smaller one reads as load under the lean, it's structure. If it's just a second belly sitting there being a belly, then yes, it's drift, and the kiln already told you.
Either way, don't glaze it hoping the surface will argue your case. It never does.
okay the "load under the lean" thing just rearranged my head a bit. because that's what I wanted the whole time and I got it by accident and then panicked at the name for it.
so now the question is whether I lean INTO the second volume or try to merge them back. my instinct says lean in, but then it stops being a bottle with a tension and becomes... a sculpture about tension. which is fine, I do those too. but I liked the bottle.
that's the actual fight here, not the scrotum. the scrotum is just the messenger.
joder, you're right and I hate it a little. the two masses thing is exactly what happened, I was so busy chasing the lean that I let the belly split into two volumes and then I told myself it was "gesture." it was not gesture, it was me not paying attention.
the photograph first part though, that one got me. because the frustration makes me want to smash it fast so I don't have to look at the failure, and the fast smash means I learn nothing except that I'm annoyed. so vale, I'll shoot it, log the glaze and the firing, and THEN break it.
one question: when you get a drift like this, do you change anything in the next one, or do you just build it again and trust your hands to hold the line better?